CogBlogged Tagged ‘nmc’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Will Pate (the irony of this photo is it pre-dates twitter!) We’re trying out a new strategy/approach/technology for our communication via twitter for NMC. Up to know, for an organization, we have the typical approach of having an “official” account @newmediac (Neil M. Cameron got there first – you have to roll with that; my thinking of “newmediac” = new media + maniac). For our twitter account I use Twitter Tools in our WordPress sites and TwitterFeed for our drupal site to push certain content out. I’ve also set it up with HootSuite to provide a way for other NMC staff to send messages out (HootSuite allows us to do this w/o sharing the account password and to schedule tweets, yes three are a number of other tools to do this). This works, but it is an approach of having one entity to represent [...]

originally published over at NMC…. Me playing web paleontologist! As an appendix to the history of the NMC, I've been researching the evolution of its web site. With the aid of the invaluable Internet Archive Wayback Machine I've been able to identify, like in Geology, the major stratigraphic layers that marks this history. Join me on this journey (and let me know if something is wrong, as much of this was before my time!) Paleolithic Period (circa mid 1990s) The very first NMC web site was very much a single HTML file and an image. Carbon dating has not been definitive in identifying the exact page it appeared (best guess is 1994), and this copy was found at a URL from Wayne Carlson at Ohio State University.The organization was described as: The New Media Centers program is a non-profit* organization committed to helping institutions of higher education enhance teaching and [...]

Many will regret (or will lie and say they were there) missing last night’s presentation performance by Jim Groom and Tom Woodard as the norm-blowing closing act for the 2008 NMC Rock the Academy Symposium. You have to wade through this blog post to get to the video recording ;-) Donning their gas masks, flame throwers, and edupunk t-shirts, Jim and Tom laid out the warnings of zombies and where they lurk in educational technology. The audience was warned before hand that this was going to be an intense, almost radioactive presentation, so we provided them safety glasses ahead of time. They started asking the audience what their fears were. [16:33]  Redbaiters Stanwell: What are scared of? [16:33]  CDB Barkley: getting sued [16:33]  Elli Pinion: lack of money [16:33]  Oggie Ballinger: Budget cuts [16:33]  Corwin Carillon: accountability [16:33]  CDB Barkley: losing students [16:33]  Mae Mathilde: lack of control [16:33]  Rane Mistwallow: security [16:33]  Hyperion Sands: privacy [16:33]  Ginger Questi: change [...]

Inspired by the brilliant twitter love video by Martin I have been thinking of trying my hand at the craft, so here is a promo video for the upcoming NMC Online Symposium on Rock the Academy: Radical Teaching, Unbounded Learning. So I stretch the stereo type of “traditional” academy, but it’s all in fun. And it is all open content. Speaking of fun, that was looking for historic videos and footage at the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress American Memory Collection as well as the usual compfight searches of flickr creative commons, and just biuncing around my feeds and friends for screen captures. Plus I did some rapid googling for screens related to the presentations on our program. There may be a slight weighting of edupunk visuals just cause it is easy to find, fun, and it is Jim. And I did not plan this, YouTube chose the [...]

image based on Creative Commons licensed flickr photo by Kevin Lim The next NMC Virtual Symposium is Nov 4-6, but early registration ends tomorrow, so don’t miss out. Rock the Academy, the twelfth in the NMC’s Series of Virtual Symposia, will explore the kinds of ideas and activities that are changing the shape of education today. Creative Commons flickr Photo by Kevin Lim Revolutionary practices are breaking apart old models of teaching and learning; students are using new tools to construct meaning and contribute to the design of their own education; teachers are sharing the power that has traditionally been theirs alone. Examples of unconventional, yet highly effective, methods of teaching and learning may be found in pockets all over the world, at all levels of education. When the multitude of examples are taken together, we begin to sense a profound change in the making that will alter our concept [...]

Besides manually updating six separate instances WordPress (to version 2.6) in the NMC fleet of sites, I also finally paid some over due attention to the version of WordPressMultiUser I have had up since November 2007. This tool some rustling to get it to the right version and also what had not been done in a while- making the front door. I am hardly a WPmu guru, certainly no bavatuesday… maybe a bavalatethursdaymorning. Most places running WPmu are doing it to provide a blog hosting service, like edublogs or the crazy stuff the Rev does at Mary Washington. My need was to have a series of separate sites hosted in WordPress w/o having to have an even bigger fleet of separate installs (Heck, maybe one day I can rope them all in under the WPmu hood). No these are all a series of online publications we have done at NMC [...]

I’m just back from a 3 day visit to St Paul for the Midwest Library Technology Conference hosted at Macalester College. This was the first time for this conference, and with attendance well over 250 and from the level of activity I observed, planner Ron Joslin and colleagues should be very pleased. I liked very much how they tried a variety of session formats other than 50 minute lectures (like in the Games in Libraries session we actually got to play some of the games; I might be hooked on Wii bowling after a few rounds). I should add another noticeable feature of note at the conference was the overt effort to be green sensitive with the amount of paper generated- the program was a singl trifold, double side printed with agenda on one side and map on the other. They asked us to turn in name badges every day [...]

Hurry up and submit your session proposals for the Apr 1-3 NMC Symposium on Mashups! This online conference will take place in both Second Life and on the web at LearningTimes. Creative Commons licensed flickr image from lantzilla Data mashups were featured on the mid-term slot for the 2008 NMC Horizon Report. And we now have a brief white paper in CommentPress form so we can generate some discussion leading up to the Symposium. C”mon, I know there are alot of readers out there who are doing cool mashed up stuff! Toss a session idea in the bin at http://www.nmc.org/2008-spring-symposium Proposals are encouraged on the topic in any of the following areas, but this list is not exhaustive and selections are not limited to these categories: * Tools and methods for creating educational mashups * Projects which demonstrate creative use of data mashups * New approaches to data visualizations based [...]

This past tuesday was the official release of the NMC 2008 Horizon Report like we do every year at the EDUCAUSE ELI Conference (hey Chronicle, that is TUESDAY, JANUARY 29 2008!). The full report is available, for free, as a 256k Creative Commons sprinkled PDF. Please download and share pervasively. As somewhat of an experiment, it was actually posted more than a week earlier on the Horizon Wiki, where in fact, all of the Horizon Project’s work has been there, in the open, from the start of this year’s process in August 2007. Not one blogger picked up on the early listing of the shortlist, the 12 finalists. But a number of y’all did find the PDF last week and started biting into it… and we like that. We are not obsessed of keeping a shroud of secrecy on the report before we let it loose at ELI. We had [...]

I’ve been eager to use CommentPress since I first heard about it. Developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, CP is a cleverly designed template for WordPress geared for online publication of books and papers. Sections of your paper are posted as blog entries, but the big, big feature is that unlike a blog post where comments are associated with the entire written work (the “post”) CP provides a tools to attach comments to individual paragraphs. Using WordPress for doing “more than cat diaries” has been one of my long standing mantras/tirades, and back when I was at Maricopa, I reconstituted our online publication into a Wp hosted version (sadly, it seems to be offline, sigh). A blog engine is ideal for doing publications. At NMC we have been thinking about ways to build more context around our online conferences, so for next week’s Symposium on the [...]