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 an organization. And this makes sense if you are a Big Giant Conglomerate with Postions Like Social Media Spokesperson or even a PR person.

But we are small, and the nebulous organization account pretty much masks the fact that we are a group of individuals.

So I’ve been experimenting with a new avenue, as suggested by Beth Kanter, called ConnectTweet

ConnectTweet allows the contributors to your central Twitter stream to continue to use their personal accounts that they are familiar with, no new logins to remember. This approach also allows your organization’s followers to discover the Twitter streams of the unique individuals that make up your company.

It works like this- once our @newmediac account is set up on ConnectTweet, I can add the twitter handles of people in our organization (or anyone I like) whose tweets can be selectively be re-broadcasted via our main account.

The method is similar to the way, if you associate your twitter account with your facebook account, that you can filter the tweets that go there by including a #fb tag — in ConnectTweet, if anyone whose account I’ve identified, sends out a tweet with #nmc, our @newmediac account will essentially retweet it, and give attribution to the tweeter.

For example, I tested with this message (yes not all that original…):

and in a few minutes, automatically, @newmedic sends its own message via ConnectTweet:

I rather like this as our NMC staff can more easily, via their own twitter accounts, send a message that goes to a different channel of followers.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by -Christophoros-

Or maybe you see it as spammy, re-tweeting yourself? i dont think so, but we are exploring it over the next few weeks.

I want to thank Ben Hedrington for giving us an early in to try ConnectTweet.

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 learning through the use of new media. Bringing together pioneers in the new media field from academia and industry, the program creates individual centers of excellence and a collaborative network of schools serving as catalysts to integrate new media into education. New Media Centers identifies colleges and universities around the world best suited to serve as models for innovation, both on campus and in their communities. By coordinating special relationships between these schools and industry leaders, the program helps them acquire and use state-of-the-art new media technology to create hands-on laboratories.

In the interest of preservation, we have placed a permanent copy at http://archive.nmc.org/web1.0

The California Years (1998-2000) newmediacenters.org

Like many other specimens from this time frame, the NMC web site was simple layout with iconic navigation. The original website address was http://www.newmediacenters.org/ which was a few static pages linking to the web site that was hosted at CSU Long Beach.

At this time, the current web domain, nmc.org was owned by the National Music Foundation (we are not sure how they arrived at "nmc" but they got there first).

At this time, we have been unable to locate the original web site as a set of files, so the reader is left to track its path via the Internet archive

Towards July 2000, the site evolved towards a slightly ore colored, albeit square blocked, design:

but as you can see, there are familiar themes like Digital Storytelling, Virtual Reality, and the Five Minutes of Fame:

Feature your project incorporating new media technologies and solutions while enjoying 5 minutes of FAME!

We carry a gong and know how to use it!

The "Green" Period: Flash+DHTML (2000-2002)

It was still quite some time before Web 2.0 arrived, with this site being designed for the NMC in a period of the emergence of Flash (there was a spash screen, of course, with "skip intro") and some dynamic HTML for the header navigation.

NMC web archeologists uncovered the entire web site lurking ina deeply buried directory on the office file server, and with careful use of modern HTML forensics, restored the "green site" to an archive at http://greensite.nmc.org/

Pre-Modern Era: The Dynamic "Squares" Site (2002-2007) www.nmc.org

A long stable period of design was this HTML tables-based layout that featured some amount of dynamic content appearing in random images used on the front page. Online registration for events was managed with a remotely hosted Filemaker database, but the rest of the site was crafted by hand out of raw HTML.

It was in 2002 when the current domains first www.nmc.net and finally www.nmc.org became our home.

This site is preserved as it was at retirement age in April 2007 at http://archive.nmc.org/

The Modern NMC (for now) April 2007 – present

The current NMC web site was unveiled in April 2007 as the current web site. Powered by open source content management tool (drupal) and running on MySQL databases, the web site is flexible, dynamic, and offers user generated content and customizations. Of course, it continues to evolve.

Scientists are unable to predict what the next era will look like….

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 in almost any form
[16:33]  Hyperion Sands: IP
[16:33]  Bron Bloxome: IP -retention rates - globalisation
[16:33]  Sarracenia Lupindo: too many students
[16:34]  Ninmah Ash: technology
[16:34]  Eliana Jigsaw: parents complaining
[16:34]  Rane Mistwallow: educational technology
[16:34]  Caspar Lefevre: chipmunks
[16:34]  Ninmah Ash: tornadoes

Jim and Tom then launched some opening strongly worded (and pictorial) warnings about zombies and where they lurk. And then when Jim yelled “Look all around you!” pandemonium broke out- the sky went dark, the corporate placards revealed their true hidden messages, and several zombies revealed themselves from their clever “normal person” disguises. Jim and Tom managed to thwart them off (for now) with their flame guns.

And then they went on to describe how to counter-act the zombies, that there is a solution…. becoming an Ed Tech Survivalist:

and learn the techniques of troutlining for information as taught from the Alabama swamps by Fishing with Tom (“the internet is just like a big swamp”):

Now this was just the fun part. Tom and Jim went on to succinctly describing the ideas of syndication, aggregating, tagging, re-organizing content using free, open source tools that liberate your organization from the zombie grip. Now while I’ve been tuned into their work for a while, I could tell for the audience the power shown in the UMWblogs examples and site wide feed tagging were really revolutionary.

You can get more of their resources, including the preso slides, from their conference session description on the NMC web site.

This was just stellar, and I cannot gush enough about the message these guys from Virginia blasted into Second Life. Don’t take my word for it, check it out yourself:

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 screen for the preview, again landing on the Reverend and definitely related his Tom, and Brian’s session on The Revolution Will Be Syndicated.

Actually, I had almost the most fun finding music, which took literally about 15 minutes to find the two tracks- going to the 78 RPMs & Cylinder Recordings collection on Internet Archive, and hitting the first page on the Orchestra Tag for Carmen March by Edison Symphony Orchestra, 1902. The “rockin” tune again was found almost right away on ccMixter, under the “rock” tag, a mix appropriately titled Dropping Out of High School Remix by Soundphile.

I was going to have the transition be a mashup of appropriate lines form some favorite songs (“For Those about to Rock” and “Rock the Casbah”), evein mixing in Audacity a short stuttering riff of the key lines.. but I dropped it since it is really not open content, and the song I had just fit perfect with a cut transition.

All of the editing was done in iMovie (the previous version which does not suck as much), no cheesy Ken Burns or transitions. All rapid cuts.

Be there November 4-6 to rock out!
http://www.nmc.org/2008-fall-virtual-symposium

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 of education itself.

We have a great line-up, certainly not everything out there that “rocks” (was hoping some of the folks doing open course would submit proposals) but the point is not to try and be all encompassing but to start some conversations. At least there will be something from the Ed Tech Survivalist and I gotta love one of my fave presenters with a title like “Teaching Naked: An A-Z Guide to Open Access Teaching”.

And yes, for those squeamish of the virtual worlds, despair! we are holding the session in NMC’s virtual Conference Center in Second Life. Have no fear; we are setting up some new technology yo provide live video streams to a web site and we are using a new “ChatBridge” tool to connect in one place the Second Life and web-based chats, so you can enjoy the conference from the mezzanine deck.

We are cooking up more, some live music, some cool interactive resources… and if I get my editing chops up over the weekend, a rocking movie.

And you can guess the theme song I’d prefer to use

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 in the lasy 8 months, all using the slick CommentPress template. Developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, CommentPress provides a way to post a series of publication chapters as “blog” posts, but the special feature is that comments can be attached to individual chapters.

So we have things like the 2008 Horizon Report in this format as well as the text of a keynote given by Howard Rheingold on Co-Evolution of Technology, Media and Collective Action.

Until just a few minutes ago, these were separate little sites, but now I have at least a crude launch page for the entire WPmu site at http://wp.nmc.org.

Getting here meant first upgrading WPmu from what I had installed, version 1.3.3 to the just released 2.6 version (they bumped the numbers to be in line with the versions of regular WordPress). The documentation on upgrading WPmu is skimpy to say the least; the ReadMe file said it had to be done incrementally from 1.3.3. to 1.5.1 and then to 2.6.

Okay that is not too much.

Except I spent 40 minutes poking arounf the WPmu site and the WP Codex w/o any luck. Finally I tossed a tweet in frustration, closed the lid, and went outside to do some real work. But the twitterverse shined and came through as Kevin Jarret pointed me to the Trac code side.

Doh, right? How the _______ would anyone find that (without friends on twitter).

The upgrade process was pretty easy. Next was the fun part, starting to rip apart the template:

This is just the start.

(A) List of Blogs on Site

One thing I needed was a list of all the blogs on the site (each a different publication), so I reached for the list-all plugin which, as you might guess, returns output of all the blogs on a WPMU site, with some options for the order, and how many it spits out. I just put some code in my index.php template to make a block that would appear above any “posts” as an index to the whole site:

<div id="opening">
<h2>Publications on this site</h2>
<ul>
<?php list_all_wpmu_blogs('', 'name', 
'<li>', '</li>', 'last_created');?>
</ul>
</div>

The div was needed to add some styles so it would stand out a bit more. At first nothing happened; I got the header but no lists. I dug in the plugin to find the MySQL query and then ran it manually in phpMyAdmin- and sure enough, it returned no results. Then I looked at the query and my wp_blogs table and realized it had a condition looking for a value of public=1 and in my table, these were all 0s. I can only guess that either my database did not get a right setting or maybe it was a new column added. My hack was to modify values in te database to set all values of public to be 1.

This was fine, but the query in the plugin also was returning a link to this same blog. So it was back to the plugin code, finding the query and adding an extra condition to the query on line 89:

AND blog_id > 1 so the main blog was skipped. That all worked.

The list-all plug in seems like a large chunk of code to do what I can see is a basic query, a lot of the stuff I did as described in WordPress Dissected. I plan to go back and just code in the query, which will allow my to pull and display other data, like the tag line, or the date published, or the number of comments, or…. With some MySQL know how, you can be a god. Sort of.

(b) List of Posts From Within

The next thing I wanted was a piece on the sidebar that would pull in content from among all the published papers within. There are a handful of plugins that do it on the WPMU Dev site, I chose Ada WPMU Recent Posts because it did so as a widget. I’m old school in my templates and have not done much with widgets except when forced to (like on WordPress.com). But since this blog was basic, I thought it would be worthwhile to get some widget experience.

It worked as advertised, and the options in the widget editor let me chose to pull Posts or Pages, and some options for ordering them.

The problem was a date order was not very interesting. When I create these Comment Press sites, I mend up cresting about 5-10 posts in a row in the same blog, because each one is chapter/section. So in this list, the would be all from the same blog because I di each site at different times.

So I tweaked the code slightly, by editing again the MySQL query that grabbed the posts, by changing line 224 in ada_list-all-posts.php (this plug is ironically built on top of the list-all.php plugin I used inn section (A)) which sets the ordering of the results to be in reverse chnronological order– I changed the line that reads:

$post_sql .= " ORDER BY post_date_gmt DESC " . $limit . "";

to read:

$post_sql .= "ORDER BY RAND() " . $limit . "";

so rather than getting 7 or 10 posts in order of most recent, I now have a random selection form across the site.

This is still in play mode. I want to add more that will pull comments form within the site to the front, and eventually some sort of site wide tag thing going.

Wow, I love tinkering in WordPress.

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 to re-use the paper and holders. There were no ugly conference bags stuffed with glossy ads. Its small but commendable.

My NMC colleague Rachel Smith and I were invited to do a keynote on the NMC Horizon Report; as heard this group was interested in exploring/examining emerging technologies. For our session, we took the risk and prepared a presentation in Web 2,0 beta software, the amazing Vuvox Collage (yes its still in beta and sorry no, I dont have beta invites to share.. I just asked them for an account). I was deeply inspired by the Balancing Act presentation shared a few weeks ago by Barbara Ganley, and rolled Collage into my 50 Ways tools with one about Dominoe.

So below is The 2008 Horizon Report: Key Emerging Technologies:

Collage does provide a presentation form quite unlike any other, and easily allows the layering of images, videos, and text on screen, along with adding hyperlinks. The ability to insert media and then use the tool to slide all subsequent media back and forth is very slick. Rotating video makes for interesing effects. And the cut-out or alpha masking tool is pretty advanced in what it can do.

Vuvox Collage seems more suited to producing content people may read on their own; controlling the position in presentation mode was a bit tricky, and when you are full screen playback mode, if you go to any web links, when you return to Vuvox, it is rewinded to the beginning.

Also, there were some problems uploading video to their site last week (they were responsive in addressing the issue), but I ended up with 5 mal-uploaded videos, and references to them in my presentation that cannot seem to be removed. That’s why there are som gaps in the presentation, as there were three references to this bad movies that are stuck as green squares with a loading symbol. Beta beta beta is beta,

But presenting to this group was fun, they were rather attentive and engaged

And when we had them do the group activity to discuss the 2008 Horizon topics, it was very interesting that the most popular ones groups selected were the more difficult far horizon concepts of Collective Intelligence and Social Operating Systems.

As a supplement to the presentation, we loaded a wiki site with the examples referenced – including a number of people we video interviewed last week via Skype:

http://media.nmc.org/2008/05/bryan-alexander.mov
Bryan Alexander on how NITLE uses the report, including use by Colgate University as funding criteria for internal grant funding

http://media.nmc.org/2008/05/vicki-davis-flatclassroom.mov
Vicki Davis spoke on the Flat Classroom Horizon Project

http://media.nmc.org/2008/05/acu-horizon-impact.mov
Geoge Saltsman and colleagues from Abilene Christian University sharing how the Horizon Report influenced their program of issuing new students iPhones

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 on mashups
* Strategies for encouraging development of mashups
* Applications of data mashups

This event is the eleventh in the ongoing series of specially focused online gatherings that explore new ideas and issues related to technology and learning. The NMC Series of Virtual Symposia is itself an exploration of emerging forms of collaboration and tools.

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 quite a crowd!

You can watch the whole thing as video as the ELI magic elves recorded and live streamed the whole session.

My usual contribution to the ELI event is helping conjure a wacky way of presenting the new 6 Horizons. This year I came up with an idea to make a nod to last year’s Blues Brother theme, but twist it slightly.

So Larry Johnson, NMC CEO, started out with the typical powerpoint overview. But he then used his phone to call in “Elwood Alexander” who last year brought the horizon topics in with his Blues Brother briefcase

Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo modified from original by Cyprien Lomas

But this time, when Elwood reaches the stage, he opens the case, and tells Larry it is empty! “Sorry Larry, I must have fallen asleep last night in Second Life”.

And then this is where my part comes in- I am actually in the next room, and Larry and I are in Second Life where we use voice chat to communciate- his SL client is hidden behind the powerpoint, so I boom, “Yo, Larry! I got yer Horizon Report right here! Move this *****ing Powerpoint, I can’t see the audience” –and “ELWOOD! you are fired”

Actually, my sources in Second Life have sent evidence that Jake Noakes may have something to do with the theft:

We then walk through a beautiful Horizon Pavilion designed by NMC’s talented CJ Carnot, with signs for each Horizon topic. Larry and I do some audio banter, and we have a special guest silky voiced Virginian recording of the description of each horizon that we play as audio. Listen?

• Grassroots Video
• Collaboration Webs
• Mobile Broadband
• Data Mashups
• Collective Intelligence
• Social Operating Systems

I tease Larry by asking why virtual worlds are not in the picture this year; he handles the jab rather nicely.

This is more of the fun half; the second half my colleague Rachel Smith sets up the group discussion activity where we ask them to pick one topic and answer the 3 questions that form our Research Agenda, which is aimed at taking the Horizon process past just the report as people work with the ideas.

All of the info collected will be added by our staff to the wiki, but we invite everyone else to jump in as well.

As a postlude, it was great that our horizon topic of Collective Intelligence was a prominent theme in Henry Jenkins’ keynote on What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About New Media Literacies as well as George Siemens’ Connectivism presentation.

But perhaps the most exciting thing for a serendipty, its all about links kind of guy like me, was the session George Siemens and Cyprien Lomas did Wednesday on Visualizing Data. They demo-ed the awesome Many Eyes app from IBM that provides word use and context analysis from documents. George suggested it would be interesting to run the 5 years of Horizon Reports through the process, and I dutifully took notes. But by the time I got home and organized and unpacked, I found that Chris Lott had already done this for us!

I love this web!

As of this post, Technorati shows 34 blog references to the 2008 report, but as my experience goes, the appearance of blog posts to the big T can lag or flow with no real pattern. But we are anxious to follow the reactions, expecting both the praise and rotten tomatoes.

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 Evolution of Communication, we published a short white paper designed to seed some ideas…

As part of a new approach to how we design our online conferences, this paper is being released in advance of the NMC Symposium on the Evolution of Communication to spark discussion, discourse, and especially critical thinking on the topic. This first topical paper is being released in a form that encourages discussion and that itself embodies the topic of the changing nature of communication.

So you have the web 0 to 1.0 version- a link to a PDF. While I was busy coughing my way across Australia, my colleagues published the paper on our web site, using drupal’s book content type to chunk it into sections, and allowing each section to get comments from readers.

And its been on my to-do list since returning to toy with creating it in CommentPress.

Yesterday, I sat down and had it done in less than an hour. Installation is a snap, if you have done WordPress before, though note you have to use nothing newer than WP 2.2 – cool, I did not know, but there is an archive of every version of WP. Edit an option or 2, set up permalinks (I used simple category/post-name), and you are ready to publish (hee hee I saw one example where the URL of the first chapter ends in “hello-world” someone needs to learn about post slugs). It took no time at all to create the 6 posts by copy/pasting the source from our other web version, and more the content needed for the About page

Additional tweaks including editing the blogroll category and items to create a list of links for the sidebar. I also turned on Askimet to see how it does to snag spam (that will come for sure).

This morning I got fancier, and added an embedded display of an RSS feed for the del.icio.us tag where we add resources, using my own Feed2Js code (the php flavor).

So there it is.. now I just need some folks to comment? Please? Head over to http://web.nmc.org/communication/, and read the paper (it is really short), and slap some comments on paragraphs.

I think it is a slick, elegant, and powerful way to put papers online.