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NMC Conference DVD is Here
available on flickr

Cleveland Rocked! So did NMC at the 2006 Summer Conference, and rocks even more since this year each participant gets their own DVD… there are the keynotes, the amazing jam session at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, examples of digital stories from the workshops, and more.

Not much else to say, expcet I am putting the disk in now to enjoy for the rest of the workday.

In years past, it was only the NMC rep from each member school that goe these disks (and it used to be about 10 minutes of video)– now every conference attendee gets a disc, and it is jam packed to the very edge of the disk… gotta jump now to see the Johnny Cash channeling by Tim from SFMOMA….

The audio quality is mostly good, with some bad moments of echos and volumes drops as the Case staff struggled to deal with the media capability of the hotel. Editing required popping the audio files to the Windows side of the MacBookPro since Audacity is not a Universal option yet. See how handy this machine is?

So hold on to your mouse… below is a slew of ‘casts…

Thursday: The conference begins- a welcome from Wendy Shapiro, the host from Case Western Reserve University.
http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/media/nmc2006-welcome.mp3 [15:17 7 Mb MP3]

Thursday: NMC’s Larry Johnson thanks opening plenary Brenda Laurel
New Media in Education: Students Looking Forward was just an inspirational message about creativity, as Brenda shared examples of the works her students create at the Art Center College of Design by working in a pure studio environment. She has a low key, slightly sarcastic tone that was just engaging. This was a great kick off to the conference.
http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/media/brenda-laurel.mp3 [54:24 24.9 Mb MP3]

How Were Thursday’s Sessions?
http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/media/thursday.mp3
Some random thoughts for participants when I accosted them in them in the hallways with my iAudio recorder.

Centers for Excellence Award
Friday: Three NMC centers, Case Western, SFMOMA, and University of Michigan were recognized for their achievements. The audio starts with an intro from Adobe, who sponsored the session, and includes some audio from a video segment they showed. Each center also showed a video, so as a podcast, some it is just music.
http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/media/centers-excellence.mp3 [35:37 16.5 Mb]

Friday: A special award of recognition was given to Carl Berger, as he was named as an NMC Fellow. I ahve had the pleasure of knowing Carl for a few years, and his excitement, vision, and energy are a model for all of us in the field. During the conference sessions, he was invariably snapping photos, posting blog entries, uploading to flickr, and asking great questions.
http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/media/nmc-fellow.mp3 [10:31 4.8 Mb]

Friday: Five Minutes of Fame the fast and furious session in which NMC members present a project or innovation and must do so in five minutes, when the gong rings and they must sit down. We had 10 presentations cover a lot of ground in just over 50 minutes.
http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/media/five-minutes.mp3 [51:20 25.3 Mb]

Friday: The NMC Second Life Campus: From Dream to Virtual Reality our session where real and virtual crossed. At Cleveland, our guest presenters Giff Constable and Sara Van Gordon from Electric Sheep Company did an overview of Second Life and their work on the design of the NMC Campus. The video from the hotel, feeble as the internet connection was, was streamed into the NMC Campus so our virtual guests could see. The first 5 minutes of the audio includes the track from the video segment (below), but be sure to tune in to hear Giff describe his perspective on Second Life (see coverage in the NMC Observer).
http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/media/second-life.mp3 [55:39 25.5 Mb MP3]

NMC Second Life Movie
The video shown during this session is available as a QuickTime movie file and as an iPod ready m4v video.
http://www.nmc.org/sl/video/nmc-secondlife.mov [5:33 Quicktime MOV 12.6 Mb]
http://www.nmc.org/sl/video/nmc-secondlife.m4v [5:33 QuickTime iPod M$v 31.9 Mb]

There, that should keep a few of you busy.

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Real and Virtual Converge
available on flickr

On the screen in the Gonick Amphitheater is streamed a live video from the Friday plenary session at the NMC Summer Conference in Cleveland. Featured is Giff Constable and Sara Van Gorden from the Electric Sheep Company, as they give an overview of the NMC Campus to both audiences.

Wow, it all worked… and worked amazingly well (despite the snafus of the hotel internet connectivity). For the Friday night session at the NMC 2006 Summer Conference, we brought together our in-person audience in Cleveland and those present virtually in the NMC Second Life Campus

On the center screen of the Gonick Ampitheater (pictured above), is the live video stream from the conference, thanks to some amazing support from the tech staff at Case Western.

Our guests were Giff Constable and Sara Van Gorden of the Electric Sheep Company, part of the creative team that built this place.

Our session started with a newly produced video that provides an overview of Second Life and the NMC Campus (coming soon online). Giff than gave a wonderful tour, highlighting some of the interesting issues that come up in Second Life. Then Sara jumped up to our Sandbox (in the sky), a place that we can practive building objects and things, and our audiences got a flavor for what it takes to “build” in second life (simple primitive shapes, or “prims”and applied texttures generated from PhotoShop.

Our audience (here at 8:00 PM on a Friday night) were electrified, so it seems. We then took the necessary steps to wrap up and assemble in the hotel foyer for our beer bash.

Wow, what can I say, but wow. It was a treat to talk with both Giff and Sara about their experience and ideas for Second Life.. it is a world unfolding before our eyes in many interesting directions.

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I know The Little Rose is There
available on flickr

Playing the Second Life memory game at the NMC 2006 Summer Conference

Duriung the late afternoon Corporate Partner’s Showcase at the 2006 Summer Conference, for the NMC booth, we set up a station connected to Second Life (with thanks to Case for the big wide plasma screen).

Participants had a chance to play the in-world Memory game with cash prizes for the best time. Here, Joann is highly focused on finding that orange circle object.

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Bang a Gong
available on flickr

Go over 5 minutes during the 5 Minutes of Fame at the NMC 2006 Summer Conference, and you shall be gonged.

What a blast- today at the NMC 2006 Summer Conference included the Five Minutes of Fame, where 10 presenters showed off their cool technical projects. But rather than the full on droning 50 minute PowerPointless Lectures, the 5MoF limits them to… 5 minutes, so we compressed 10 incredible projects presented in less than an hour. It is fast, fun, and wild.

I got to be the emcee and run back and forther between microphones to announce the presenters.

G-O-N-G!

I’d write more florid details, but the conference is going into full swing today after a great opening reception last night sponsored by Apple. A lucky lady walked out with a new iPod as a prize for the birds of a feather activity! Great things happening today in Cleveland.

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Rockin’ In Cleveland
available on flickr

Pick up your bags at the NMC 2006 Summer Conference.

Tomorrow night’s reception opens the 2006 NMC Summer Conference, my first one having crossed the line from mere participant (which is a wonderful experience from my previous experiences at 4 previous NMC cons), to behind the scenes organizer (and gofer, and sign setter-upper, and bag stuffer and session planner and….)

The blogging here is likely to sputter as things go into high gear tomorrow. Pre conference institutes have been going since Monday over at the Case Western Reserve University Campus (a gorgeous lush place I have seen mainly from the window of a van) and continue tomorrow. I have been tapped to lead a hands-on workshop on Pachyderm, of which I have been crash coursing the last few days, producing my first real, more than tinkering project (it is still got some bumps to wrinkle out and will be linked soon).

I’ll be changing the theme of some previous flickr tagging, if the reason is not blatantly obvious.

After a day full of set-up and trying to find ways to help people navigate the routes in the non-linear Peter B Lewis building, it was a treat to have a hilarious and fun dinner with Bryan and Rachel. We took a recommendation for an ethnic restaurant close to the hotel, and ended up at Sergios… we sat at an outside table, looked up, and saw something familiar across the street– that curvy Peter B. Lewis building!

Oh well, the brain cells are headed towards oatmeal, and I am looking forward to the conference kicking into gear tomorrow. Hopefully the tagging will pick up as well and I am on the prowl for some informal audio interviews for our podcast section.

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Holding Hands
available on flickr

A fascinating sculpture outside a Department of Education building in Calgary

My other web experiment today for the NMC Conference is setting up a page to provide some persuasion and aggregation for my goal of having participants “Tag This Conference”.

The site I set up:
http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/tag.php

is aggregating the public tags of nmc2006 from Flickr, Technorati, and del.icio,us… and is using 3 different services for doing so.

For flick, I use the JavaScript Flickr badge to display all photos tagged with nmc2006 (of which there are a grand total of 2, both mine planted as seeds.

For technorati, to catch Feed2JS using the php include method (don;t look to sponge feeds off of this server, the publc script is not loaded here).

And for del.icio.us, something different… I used tagalicious a PHP script that is very similar as it also uses the MagpieRSS parser, so that bit is shared with Feed2JS.

Again, very little is there since no one is tagging. Boy, I hope they do.

And the picture here? I tried to find an icon for “tag” and got some strange, unsuitable for public audience images in Flickr, and I recalled the photos I took of these cool statues in downtown Calgary when I was passing through in June 2004. I had not loaded them into flickr, so I quickly did. They are very cool, and the hands touching were the metaphor I was looking for…. let’s play TAG! tag! T-A-G! tag?

But I’ve known in the back of my mind, it does not need to be so, as shown by the feeds displayed at Feedburner, e.g. http://feeds.feedburner.com/cogdogbloglab– that is the URL you can use anywhere RSS is accepted, but viewed in the browser, well it looks like a nice pretty web page. Peek at the source, and you are back in code-ville. Howzit done?

Through the magic of XSLT, a means to transform XML with stylesheets into something easier on the eyes, By no means do I really understand it, and the more I looked, the more complex it grew– it is almost a logical language in itself, that is.can be used to transform data into human content.

Anyhow, I bruteforced my way through my first real example. For next week’s NMC Summer Conference, I wanted to set up a site to host some podcasts, getting hopefully digitized files from the main sessions, and doing some conference participant on the street interviews, etc. To make it simple, I am relying on some code and concepts I used before to generate iTunes Ready RSS from data I can manage in an Excel Spreadsheet, and run through a PHp script to update the XML file.

This is no different from any other RSS file, except it references in the second line an XML stylesheet:

<?xml-stylesheet title="XSL_formatting" type="text/xsl" href="podcast.xsl"?>

which pretty much contains the basic web structure of the other conference web pages, except it is littered with a few more xls statements and stuff to template-ize the content in the XML file. Again, this was brute forcing it, just keeping at it until Firefox stopped reporting errors. XML is a lot less forgiving than HTML, all tags need closers, you have to watch the &’s, etc. And then there was something just major goofy with Internet Explorer choking on some hidden character (finally tracked down with some help from BBEdit).

Anyhow, this URL is really just XML.RSS, but with a style sheet duded up to match the other conference pages (yes, I know al about the issues of the web design here, the tiny fonts, etc, that is all going into the factory over the summer for an overhaul):
http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/podcast.xml

There is only one item there now for testing purposes, it will be filled in next Wednesday as the conference unfolds. I might add the little MP3 flash players. I did have to make some fun generating a testable MP3, laying down some tracks in Garageband….
http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/media/alan-welcome.mp3

Yummy, tasty, XML. Please pass the whipped cream.

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Cleveland Rocks
available on flickr

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Next week, June 7-10, is the NMC Summer Conference, this year we are in Cleveland, hosted by a Fab Four of Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Cleveland Museum of of Art, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

This is my first time being at the conference as part of the organzing team, rather than past years as a partiicipant, so maybe when I say the program is tremendous, my bias is showing. But since I first attended my first NMC (Ohio State in 2002), it became my “must-attend” conference.

One of my interjected ideas is to put in the printed program a call for an official conference tag:

Use web 2.0 tools to link conference content online! When you post photos, movies, blog posts, and relevant web sites using a web tool that supports tagging, be sure to add the official conference tag: nmc2006 tag. That will make it easy share and find content using Flickr Technorati, del.icio.us, and similar sites.

To see what has been tagged so far, visit these links:
http://www.technorati.com/tag/nmc2006/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/nmc2006/
http://del.icio.us/tag/nmc2006

So for anyone attending the conference this year, be sure to upload lots of photos, bookmark sites, and post blog entries tagged with nmc2006. I am working today on an aggregator / display page for the conference site, and cooking up a podcast page as well.

And what could be cooler! For the Thursday night reception at the Rock and Roll Museum, they are opening up the 4th floor studio for us to jam.

What a week it will be in Cleveland, see you, tag you there!