It was an honor, privilege, and a hoot to be invited to come to Melbourne to do a 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story presentation for the PLP Network project here.

This all came about because in October, during my road trip, I paid a visit to the home of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach in Virginia Beach (get it, beach? beach?). We have known each other for a long time online but had never met in carbon form. Over dinner, she told me that her colleague, Will Richardson (whom I did not get to meet on the loop) was unable to attend the culminating meeting for their project in Australia, and would I be interested in going in his place to do a keynote?

I think I said yes before her question ended.

Thanks Will, we had way too much fun talking about my qualifications being a pony tail. Thanks for also sending me the audio clip I used to introduce you as one my my online avatars:

Will Richardson intro

So that was my meal ticket to make the big crossing, but you have to bring your best stuff, and I hope I did. I mixed up my usual presentation with some new elements.

All of the presentation stuff, including slides and links are at http://50ways.wikispaces.com/plpconnectu. I had thought about doing a live broadcast to ds106 radio, but port 8010 seemed to be blocked, so I recorded my own audio.

Audio archive of presentation (71.7 Mb / 1:14:40)

I had my Keynote autotweeting in active mode, to share links, and draw people in from the outside when the activities started.

The reason this was special is because the very first 50 Ways workshop was done in Australia, back in October 2007 on my 2 week whistle stop tour of every capital city for the Flexible Learning Framework.

So I started with the Amazing FLower story that happened there, for no other reason than is pretty amazing.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I also used a more recent story that came out of a presentation I did for Alec Couros’s ECI831 class, one that Kevin Stranack shared about a bit of family discovery that started with one out of the blue email.

Before going into the 50 Ways bit, I set up a few activities based on the ARG activity Sheryl and her team had set up for the participants here- it was a story about the PLP penguin, Periwinkle who had somehow gotten him/herself tied up in a boxing match with a tough kangaroo named Joey.

The think is we know about this as an event, but I wanted the groups to do some work on how these characters developed their personalities, do some creative activities to develop their personas. I went back to an activity I learned of in the late 1990s, when I worked on a project at maricopa with a colleague Liz Warren, who teaches at South Mountain Community College.

We took an activity she had already developed to foster creative writing, built around the ideas of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, and made into a web tool for that and more. Stunningly, it still sits on the web server at Maricopa, though it is not fully functionally — see http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey.

This really happened because by another sheer accident of timing, the night after I returned home from my 5 month road trip, Liz was doing a live storytelling event in Pine, AZ, and I went to see Tellebration again and to say hello.

Anyhow, before the writing prompt questions for the 17 steps of the Hero’s Journey, Liz developed a series of questions designed to help outline the main character’s traits; and I used these same ones for my group.

I split the room in tow, and had half the room work on the questions about Joey’s character and half do the same questions about Peri (created in open Google docs) — they took to it with more activity and energy than I could have dreamed of!

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I had to pull them out of the google docs while they were still writing and laughing.

To use thids material and introduce them to another tool, I asked for a volunteer to come up on stage and lead the choices of photo for a 5 card flickr story (I had gotten people to tag about 300 photos with the project tag plpconnectu).

Lois was a great sport (see her story) — I set the group out to do their own, and again, they really ran with this activity.

We still had a lot of ground to cover.

I wanted to extend the story development process, again leaning on Liz Warren’s Hero’s Journey approach. I made the groups switch, the people who had worked on Joey’s character, now had to review the traits about Peri, and enter the responses to the Call to Adventure stage for Peri — and likewise, the other group do the same for Joey’s Call to Adventure

Again- well I had to work hard to get their attention back. I then got two more volunteers to come up on stage and do a pechaflickr round of improv /a> with those plpconnecu tagged photos.

Both Trish and … (ugh was it Rob) both did pechaflickr the way I envisioned it; not be being 100% literal, but also by keeping their banter moving between slides.

I had to rev the session into 9th gear, running through the media search and the examples. We clearly did not have time for them to do the story creation with the 50+ tools, but I had but one more new trick in my bag.

I told them that I have been asked to develop a thing that would help pick the right tool for people, and I had that ready- it was devised to take biometric input and learning analytics to provide a predictive tool selection- all they needed to do was click “pick” on the 50 Ways Tool Picker

And that was the whole show.

I have to say this was one of the most high powered groups I’ve gotten to present 50 ways to– and I have had some great groups. It changes the whole atmosphere when you have people who are on the edges of their seat and willing to jump in and play.

And with that, my work here in Australia is done, and its 2 weeks of play time.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Time to go play!

Last night was a presentation for Dean Shareski‘s ECMP 355 Course (no web site?), which I believe is a University of Regina course for pre-service teachers, “Computers in the Classroom”. And I did two more ones today for the Powerful Learning Practice group from El Paso that Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach and Will Richardson leave. I gotta give Sheryl and hear team a to of credit in providing tech support to these teachers; they had them ALL verify and test their voice connection before I started, and rally provided a lot of energy to the back channel.

All the participants were highly active, and took on my game of story prompts, this time using an open white board in Elluminate (I squint and ignore the corporate name on the login screen). A lot of thees teachers are already making use of ones like Voicethread, Glogster and Animoto, but also a number them like Blabberize and today there was strong interest in Tikatok and Zooburst.

I did not have time to add it today, but my long time Apple buddy Paul Valach shared this example, which is a 2-fer– a teacher has set of a Clogster site for linking to student projects that explain math principles, each one of those links is an Animoto video. Check it out http://clsatb123.edu.glogster.com/math-animoto/.

I’ve found that with variable network connections, its not worth doing live demos of the tools, so I talk through examples I have screenshots for. I do upload a quicktime version of the Dominoe story which does play well in the space (it is disturbing to hear how many teachers have to work in environments of blocked sites, it suggests that school systems teach their most valued employees as children),

I don’t have links for Elluminate archives yet, but I recorded my own audio from the session for Dean’s class, and loaded it in Slideshare with my slides (I like doing this since this method is one of the 50)

I still enjoy doing this presentation, though I prefer not at this frequency. I dont want to become one of Those Guys Who Do the Same Shtick For Everyone. I still have a chunk of updates to do for the new wiki, and still have about 15-20 tools waiting in the wings to write up.

The new wiki format is designed for other people to edit the descriptions of the tools, add their own examples, and share some feedback on the usefulness of the tool (see how to add to the wiki). I have also created a new wiki page that lists the tools that have special features for teachers. This page, and the Tools by Type and Tools by Media Capability are generated automatically based on a structure of tags I set up.

After all this, I sure feel like Curly does in this photo

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by mfhiatt

I had way, way too much fun (as if there is really such a measurement) with my presentation yesterday for the ITC 2011 conference here in Florida. On the beach. Under the sun.

Maybe it was because this was all brand new material- or just it was because I got to talk about my favorite subject, photography.

I called this “Through The Lens” and you can find the various bits and links and slides and audio at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/itc11.

Through the Lens (audio)

The things I tried to aim for were some really weak metaphor comparisons between both mechanics of cameras (aperture as being breadth of attention, shutter speed as time spent, iso as sensitivity) and the artistic ends (snapshots versus good photos, cropping, composition) etc and learning. I tossed in the notion of context via reference to the brilliant column by Errol Morris Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire — which sadly, is now tucked safely inide the paywall of the New York Times (may their plan go down in flames, please).

The other side of this was my piece on how on gets better at doing things– you do them. You get to be better at photography by doing the 10,000 hours at at (and no, Gladwell is not the source, only a referrer).

And really, at the end, the slides that only emerged at midnight the night before, is the piece we do not spend a whole of of ed tech attention to- the most powerful force in the learningsphere- motivation. Not posters or incentives- that deep seated drive that makes one want to go beyond average, to become better at X, to figure out what they want to/should learn that they are not aware of now.

I only resorted to one dog photo too, as duly noted by the eloquent EDUHULK

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by -=RoBeE=-

and this really was merely to present the concept of aperture priority.

Thanks ITC for letting me take the stage to show and talk about the power of photography.

I have an addiction.

It involves…. cameras.

Since 2008, I’ve been in a flickr group of people sharing daily photos; we are now at 500. No one is in charge, no one makes rules. I’ve also been participating in the dailyshoot version since November 2009.

I cannot stop. My day is wrong if I am not finding imagery in it, and then reflecting on it later in the day (or at 2am in the evening).

But every time I do this process, every day, I am either stretching my ability on photography or creatively trying to write captions to make my photos fit the themes. It is daily creation, and as a metronome in my life, it is a steady creative click.

I’m using this loosely as a metaphor for learning in at least two upcoming presentations, so I’m casting a call (again) for help. No, Dean “I Always Cooperate” Shareski, I am not making you do another another video ;-)

The first one I am up for is the KU Village Online Conference next month- an online conference run by Kaplan University, and I am sharing the stage with people like Alec Couros (who is everywhere and anywhere and fabulous) and Steve Wheeler (@timbuckteeth has one of the best twitter icons and and shared stuff).

The conference is September 20 – 23, 2010– and the blurb reads

Here at the KU Village, we can get to know each other in the Village Square, share our ideas about teaching and learning at the conference events, and learn about emerging technologies that will change the virtual and site-based classroom experiences as we wander in the Greenhouse. It’s our time, so let’s have some fun and share the experience!

The theme of KU Village 2010 is “Connect, Communicate, and Collaborate.” KU Village 2010 will provide presentations on the following topics:

* Standards for academic excellence
* Innovations in the classroom
* Collaborative teaching techniques and initiatives
* Global learning and diversity
* Commitment to educational values and student support
* Technology tools and applications

You can register at http://www.kuvillage.org/ (it is free if you work for Kaplan University, US$95 for everyone else).

Okay. My session is loosely titled Say It in Photos, and in part of it, I am wanting to talk about what happens to people when they decided to take on doing a Photo a Day project.

So I am seeking a few testimonials or stories of what the experience of doing this has meant for people– please drop a few words for me at http://bit.ly/dailyphoto-stories.

I’ll also be doing a bit of five card flickr stories for them… if you want to add a few photos into the mix, just tag some new ones in flickr as fiveku and people will start making stories (or you can, it’s open).

Thanks.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by NMC Second Life

What’s even the point?

Frankly, I’ve been in this game long enough and see what too many of us (often me, yes I am Mr Pot calling kettle black) rely too heavily on the linear slide deck to prop up what we are communicating.

It’s not that all slide presentations are bad– its just most of them are ;-) Even with plenty of people getting away from 9 point font (I still saw a session last week with some slides carrying 60+ words) and becoming more Presentation Zen-like, isn’t there still an over-reliance of being driven by the deck?

I’ve never been brave enough to do this– imagine presenting with zero slides. Jared Bendis has done this masterfully at our SL based symposia- in The Future Holds No Dignity: The Death of Ethics in the Digital Age he just sat his avatar on a prop of Lucy’s “The Doctor is In” booth and talked.

Okay, so we are not all audio virtuosos. I know I say “um” too much to do this. But I will suggest that in doing our presentations, we don’t given nearly enough (or any) effort to our voice– projection, inflection, creating excitement. It is merely us just blabbing away. Often in a monoto-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Versatile presenters like Gardner Campbell spend a lot of time preparing their audio portions, and can really carry a talk with just their voice. Cynthia Calongne, who has presented for us in Second Life countless time, is amazing smooth with an even voice that does convey a pattern of inflection, plus she is so adept at keeping the audio going as she manipulates things like interactive games for the audience.

I can hear the response already “Yeah, but he has that great FM radio voice. I am dull.” And then we cop out, and toss more slides in the deck. I think we can all to do more with our voice- I’ve heard many monotoners talk after a session with a lot more passion, and in a much more vibrant tonal range than their presenting voice. Where do we get the idea that a monotone makes us sound smarter? That stifling the emotional range of natural voice is better?

In our NMC virtual symposia, we spend a lot of effort coaching our presenters on using sets, props, and trying to get them thinking beyond the deck flipping. It is as simple in some places of doing a set like an artist studio, or maybe some props related to metaphors in a topic.

Still thinking in the 3d space, we have seen other approaches to presenting that are slideless- from more like performances (sometimes with real zombies) of Jim Groom, Brian Lamb and Tom Woodward to Kieran Cannistra and Doug McDavid doing more of a back and forth conversation (video) to others being set as a series of role plays with the audience as participants.

Even if you have slide-like content, showing them in a novel, meaningful way helps, like last week, when Kim Anubis, who’s real world company is called The Magicians, wove that metaphor into her talk with a crystal ball:

cc licensed flickr photo shared by NMC Second Life

Again, I am not saying at all that slides are bad, and that one cannot do great presentations with slides.

My colleague Chris did a great talk last week; he had slides, but he filled the spaces in between with his voice- in fact the slides did not drive his message, he drove the slides with what he had to say.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by NMC Second Life

But the energy in the place revved up dramatically, when he started doing a live demonstration:

cc licensed flickr photo shared by NMC Second Life

But more often then not, slides becomes the crutch, the focus. You focus all the effort on the cool images, and cram more in the deck than you can possible flip through.

And yes, I am raising my hand in admission I do this a lot.

But there are, and must be, different modes we can use to present that break free of Slidedeckophelia.

It’s why I relied on many times the last few years the method I concocted using the CoolIris viewer; it is still slides in a way, but with a wall of media, you can, if you plan right, do something where you can go in almost any order. And yes, mostly I plot these too as linear; the most I broke this approach was at Open Education Conference last year with the videos I had laid out for Amazing Stories of Openness. With the videos sprawled across a CoolIris wall, I could pick any of them out and talk about them or play them.

So here I sit after blasting a lot of whats wrong, yet what do I have to offer as other ways? I am not prepared with exact answers, but this is what I suggest:

• There are more ways to present a talk then a walk through a slide deck.
• We do not give nearly enough preparation to the most important media we use in a talk– our voice (which is why most links to slide decks are worthless- a presentation file is not a presentation
• If we shirk away with, “Oh my voice is not strong” or “I am not creative enough to so anything different”… than we are copping out.
• It is feasible for anyone of us (I can hear you wincing already) to do an effective talk with zero slides.

I am not anti-slides. I am anti-overreliance on slides in our professional communication. As multi-sensory beings, we respond to a variety of inputs; use ‘em all (“yeah right, are you presenting with smell now”?)

Again, I am as guilty as the next one in being a Slidedeckopheliac.

But I am aiming at breaking that habit.

One day.

Maybe I’ll give a talk about it.

Without slides.

I was pleased to be invited to give a keynote on Friday at Tulane University’s Tech Day… they run a great free event open not only to the Tulane community but they offer it to other local institutions:

Tech Day is an opportunity for the Tulane community to come together and celebrate the technology that makes life on our campus what it is. It is a day of toys, tech, food and fun. We will have academic and technical presentations as well as games and door prizes. Come show your licks at Guitar Hero or your moves in Dance Dance Revolution. Or come learn about the new trends in technology and education with presentations from our faculty and the vendors that provide us with the technology you use every day. Tech Day is free and open to the public.

A few months ago I was asked if I was interested (are you kidding? It’s in New Orleans, my bags are packed!) in speaking about social media. I was prepared to dust off and update one of my previous dog and web shows, but a few weeks back I felt like a different urge to focus on, fro among the stuff I track for the NMC Horizon Project, the up and coming buzz word seemed to be the “real time web”.

Even more vague in meaning than “Web 2.0″, I saw some wiggle room to try and make a case for some ways in which the web we know and love (maybe) right now is transforming into the next web that will be.

Maybe.

So you can catch my newest CoolIris preso at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/tulane09/ — where you will also find all the links I used and more — it was not live streamed but it was video recorder, and as soon as the crack Tulane video time puts it through the “Remove the ‘Um’ Filter and Make Him Sound Knowledgeable plug-in” I will share. I did aim to use some reach to the audience beyond who is present with some twitter shout outs, calls to respond to instant surveys, etc. I do see a lot of power in demonstrating the Audience2.0 effect.

The remote audience also missed the point towards the end where I realized I had neglected to plug in my power supply, and has my 16% battery went quickly down (luckily my friends here hustled as I tried to talk my way through the black screen of powerlessness).

But here I do a little Post Presentation Recap (where is John Madden when I need him?)

I do like to have some media running as the audience enters; this time I set up a playlist in iTunes to run through a few top videos looking at social media, including the fab new Did You Know 4 and Social Media Revolution. Mike Wesch’s A Vision of Students Today is a reliable “classic”, and I tossed in my own Rock the Academy video (hey, it is my show).

As an opening, I used something I heard in a recent presentation by Kevin Kelly, where he remarked on how much has changed in the 6000+ days since Tim Berners Lee announced the WWW (you can find this original newsgroup posting). I used the World Time Clock Date Duration Calculator to come up with 6625 days for the day I gave my presentation.

I tried to frame this against things that have radically changed, revolutionized, overturned in this time span by the web – myself (deploying my youthful mullet head from 1992), TV; telephony, publishing, music, etc and leave the hanging question- where is the parallel change in education?

I don’t carry a pat answer, but does Google know what the Real Time Web is? http://www.google.com/search?q=realtime+web? I felt like this YouTube video explained it rather clearly how it works

Not one for focusing on definitions, my aim was to provide examples, but I see some range in what this means, and dont see a lot in having a boxed in specification for it. It does not mean everything in “real time” more more near real time than we typicalyl feel. There is the real-time ness of immediacy, when we back and forth in social media conversation, the real-timeness of dynamically updating data with little or no effort, the real-timeness of the web shifting from notions of “pages” to much smaller bits of data that can be recast, reformed, visualized, passed on….

I wanted to show some things I played with recently, updating web sites with real time updated data or charts generated by Google Spreadsheets (http://cogdogblog.com/2009/08/31/google-spreadsheets/). I had set up a three column sheet, initially with 0 values (and show the chart) and asked an audience volunteer (thanks Simon!) to estimate the percentages of people responding.. I asked how many had twitter accounts, how many had facebook accounts, and how many had web enabled smart phones.

I first used some examples of things I’d looked at before as giving a sense of the web being created and expanding all the time, things that allow you to actually see it happen, including

• BloggerPlay – the current images being used in Blogger posts http://play.blogger.com/
• TwitterVision- geomapping recent twitter messages http://beta.twittervision.com/
• WikiPediaVision – geomapping the people doing the most recent WikiPedia edits http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/
• UStream.tv – being able to see realtime personal web strreaming http://ustream.tv/

I then showed how not only the Google Spreadsheet chart changed, but also how I could use the URL that it generates elsewhere- when the data changes, so does the graphic. The point is to contrast how I have done this before- create an Excel Spreadsheet, manually update the data, then make a new graphic of the updated chart, resize and upload to my web site– thats a lot of manual effort. With doing this in Google, I can update my web sites simply by updating my data (and if you can find the ways to dynamically update the spreadsheet data, you are in graduate level Tony Hirst territory). Also very relevant is the KillerAttitude’s Facebook data presenter a la GapMinder via Google tools.

As an extension of this, I next did a demo of creating a simple web survey in Google (wow, it feels like the Google show so far, stand by…) and had the audience help create the third question on this survey http://bit.ly/1G4Vr. I also sent the link out on twitter for those folks to take the same survey, and shifted to looking at the spreadsheet as the data (http://bit.ly/YizJT) came filing in (I wish I had screen capture on this, still something that makes my inner geek smile madly).

In the end I had 85 responses, wow! The results are in (and the sarcastic clowns like me show up in open ended responses)

That actually worked better than I could hope for.

I went on to dive a little into twitter, I did not show the Twitter Life Cycle, but more less talked about the common first outside looking in twitter experience being “That’s the stupidest thing I heard of; who wants to know what I are for lunch?”

I went on to do a bit with twitter search, especially some of the options available on the advanced search, showing the tweets from people near New Orleans with a “positive attitude” – which twitter arguably defines as using a smilie ;-)

I tried to suggest how using twitter follows the Shirky logic of not whining about too much information, but avoiding filter failure– and giving credit to Alec Couros’ post on managing a lot of followers.

There are tons of things to show in twitter for real-timeness- I talked about bots like http://twitter.com/helpmesolve but did show twistori that pulls in a stream of tweets containing feeling words like “love” “hate” “like” “believe” etc.

This was a nattural lead-in to this great quote I had found on Clive Thompson’s current Wired column on How the Real-Time Web Is Leaving Google Behind (not the first nor last time his articles have been that timely for me):

which too may says search will not be a one size fits all approach.

And continuing rapid pace firehosing, I did a quick fly by on twtpoll with a single item question on New Orleans- retweeting it out from twtpoll worked well; and it is a very simple tool for building polls/surveys and sending it out via multiple methods. I just described twitcam as kind of like doing ustream w/o even needing an account besides one in twitter.

Showing blip.fm as a real time example worked well; I asked the audience for a song to search for, and we landed on Sam Cooke’s It’s a Wonderful World (which again went out automatically to twitter) and I talked through my own experience of seeing a blipped song go out to twitter, picked up by the twtbokdj and play on the jukebox. I would have preferred to show the blip.fm stream where you can sample in real time the songs people are playing.

Time was running down as I talked through http://enjoysthin.gs/ and then real time search engines OneRiot and Wowd which take different paths to real-time-dom.

And I closed with a little snippet of video from Google Wave preview, and my earnest play to be among the 100.000 wave riders let on the water September 30. It should be a game changer which does not always mean it will.

Wow, I did manage to cover most of what I wanted to in about an hour. Thanks Tulane for inviting me and thanks to all the great folks I met there.

My session yesterday at the Open Education Conference was absolutely the most fun thing I have put together for a conference. it was so fun I did not wait til the night before to finish it. The images above were totally not necessary, but I found myself up at 1:30am mocking up old covers from a collection of scans of the original Amazing Stories magazines (for which, I openly admit, I may not have permission to do).

So if you want to watch the presentation, you can do so via the UStream recording

but to be honest, it is better explored via the Amazing Stories site— the CoolIris version of the presentation (more or less a glossy way to browse the stories), or the individual stories as launchable videos, or the URLs relevant to the stories, or even a flash player to play them all sequentially at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/.

The Idea

I wanted to come to the Open Education Conference
mainly for the caliber of other people participating, and is it seemed, I was able to meet a long ist of colleagues whom for up to now, I have only known online. Lots of people have this experience, and maybe we lose sight of how amazing this piece is that our online collaboration spirit is enhanced, amplified by the times we get to meet in person.

But to be honest, I dont have a lot to do with open content or open courseware.

So I rolled back to think just about the value of open- of sharing things online, and my past stories of funny, weird, and lovely serendipitous things that have come my way because of content I’ve put online- hence the idea to get other people to share their own stories.

I’ve long been interested, or more likely baffled, by why it seems so many in education are reluctant to share. This goes back so long in my career I cannot remember, and was heightened in the days I was working on a system to make it so easy to share that it was nearly fun.

And now I wonder why something so basic something that seems innate in kids in their play with other peer kids– is somehow schooled out of us in passage through the educational system. And thus I end up with my gut sense of what most kids know- when we share it feeds into the system that ultimately ends up with others others back to us.

It seemed as well when I talked to the people who contributed this stories that it does not take much of a response (a comment, and email) to generate the feedback loop. We all crave connection and attention and approval, and filling the world with more of the above towards others cannot but help.

It’s my hope that these stories just inspire a sense of, “I want to be part of this” or “that’s pretty easy” or whatever it is that makes people realize what I have known for long- when you share your stuff in the open, good things come back in return. That is not the reason to be sharing, but it is an outcome

At the same time, I have to avoid creating the expectation that if you just hang your photos in flickr or writer blog posts, that the riches will shower down on you. It is not a guarantee, and it also involves the other important aspects of giving feedback and response in other people’s online space.

The best thing to say about this came from my conversations with Clay Burell. I asked him about not wanting to put out this hope, that just by sharing content, you can’t count on getting some unexpected surprises. He sharply noticed then the only guarantee is

If you don’t share.. then you won’t get any unexpected surprises.

Was “Amazing” Too Big?

I issued a call for stories through several channels, and am clinging on to looking at that half full glass of the people who did share their stories, but at the same time, I was thinking I might get inundated with so many of these.

Perhaps “Aamzing” suggested to people that it had to be Huge, Epic, World Changing things I was looking for– in fact. I sought the opposite, the little, the small, the ones that just made us smile in amazement. Maybe it should have been “Amazing Little Stories of Openness”.

But I did get a Gardner Campbellian bag of gold.

The Method of Getting Stories

I hatched this idea in May or June, and set out getting responses by blogging about it, setting up a WikiSpaces site to host a call, groveling on twitter, etc.

What worked well was setting up a Google Form to have people share their contact info, the gist of the story, a preferred method of response (email, Skype, etc).

It was a few weeks later that I got the idea that posting a video call in YouTube would be effective, since people could just respond in a video reply.

I absolutely wanted this to be video, and for the few people who just sent the story details or did not respond to my emails, sorry I did not get yours in the mix.

The videos were acquired in multiple ways:

• Recording a Skype video call (using eCamm Conference Call Recorder for Mac OS). These worked well as it did not take anything on the tellers part, and I could ask some follow up questions. My fatal flaw was forgetting to record in the mode that puts my video/audio in a separate track, hence the heavy breathing looming in the background of a few stories.
• People send me their own recorded videoa. Oh that made it easy! Thanks Terry Anderson. Mikhail Gershovich sent a great audio recording, of which I ended up plucking images to use as visuals
• Recording people with my Flip Mino. This little device had some of the best video quality; I snagged a few while attending the ED-MEDIA conference (Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Rick Schwier) and also at home when Sue Waters visited in Arizona (and my own mug shots).
• Snagging from YouTube. Darren Kuropatwa, Cole Camplese, Mike Bogle, D’Arcy Norman, and Leigh Blackall posted them, and I was able to snag them as MP$ with the Download YouTube Videos as MP4 Greasemonkey script
• My little Canon camera. The little IXY came handy at ED-MEDIA in capturing stories from Nancy White and Tony HIrst whilst sitting in the windy dark of the hotel bar (thanks to whomever had the LED flash list, that worked perfectly.
• Pure improvising. I kept trying to bug Jennifer Jones into doing a story, but she was busy with a move, so I had fun taking the 4 phrase fragments she sent to the Google Form, mixing them with screenshots and background music into her story
  .

Editing The Videos

I went very simple on the editing, doing it all in a 3 year old version of iMovie HD. I sought out screen shots and photos that were part of the stories so that I could as on screen overlays (the voice continues in the audio channel).

I do this typically by separating the audio and video tracks, so I can insert a still to take the place of video, but often small bits of offset end up with the video and audio being out of sync

I have a simple approach for doing this, which is not always easy in iMovie since you only have one video content track (my next project is complex enough to warrant cracking open Final Cut Pro).

After importing my entire clip into iMovie, I trim and junk from the start and end, and if there are distinct breaks (e.g. if I have multiple stories in a single track) I use the Spit Video at Playhead option to break the clip into parts.

I first locate the point in the timeline IO want to insert my image, and note the time at this in point, in this example, 2:20:04 (it helps to be zoomed way in on the timeline so you can fine tune your cursor placement). I then do a command T or Edit – Split Video at Playhead to make a first cut.

I then move the playhead to an even number seconds ahead, usually I did 5 second inserts, but sometimes 3 or 4 seconds would do, and do another Split Movie at Playhead. If you click the timeline between these two points, you have the segment of video to replace.

Now with this 5 second segment selected, what I do is go to Advanced-Extract Audio, which then puts the audio for this segment only into the audio track.

Now I click the video track 5 second segment again, and delete that video clip. I can drop in the still image I want to appear in the 5 second space.

By having just the replaced segment’s audio on the sund track, I can be very precise in making sure my inserted still image lines up at the exact in/out points.

From here, I can go into the Media – Photos-Show Photos tools to zoom the still, or apply Ken Burns effects.

Oh Ken Burns.

It’s easy to make people nauseous with a lot of big zooms, but done in doses, it works well. My approaches are:

• Vary the direction of the zoom. If the previous sequence zoomed in, make the next one zoom out.
• Make only small amounts of movement. You dont have to zoom way in and out. Doing some with small amounts makes it seem less in your face.
• Try doing pure pans. Going across an image gives a sense of flow, direction.
• Get fancy with 3 point moves. The iMovie tool only lets you go from one point to another, but I have a method fo doing a 2 stepped Ken Burns; one that moves from point A to B, then from B to C.
  • So create a space for say, and 8 second insert.
  • Make the first one 4 seconds long.
  • Set the stop and end points for the first move, and apply the effect.
  • Now select and copy this 4 second clip, and paste it in as a copy right after the first one. Right away, use the reverse button– this makes the starting point exactly at the ending point of the first clip.
  • Now set the end point of the second clip the ultumate destination, and update.

I saved all my clips as MPEG 4, Exporting with the iMovie Expert Settings, using:

• MPEG-4 (MP4) using H.264
• Data rate: 672 kbits.sec
• 480 x 360 image size
• Frame rate 29.97 fps
• Key Frame: automatic
• Under Video Options- Best Quality (multi-pass)
• AAC-L (Music), 44.1 kHz, 128 kbps

I then converetd this to FLV for use in my web site.

Assembling into the Web Site

I tossed the full pile of media into the final web site at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/.

Firstly, I set my presentation up to play in CoolIris… not to be explained here, but I have outlined it elsewhere. It’s a matter of creating a directory of images (U usually do at least 800×600 JPEGs for the full images, and 240×180 JPEGs for the thumbnail images. And yes, I roll the MediaRSS file by hand.

I am super wary of bad internet connections at conferences, so I run the entire show fro my MacBookPro running a local copy of the Apache web server, This minimizes the load time of media and bails you if thr local hotel wireless sucks (which it usually does).

I had to do something different for this presentation, since I dod not have time or desire to play all the stories as video. I created a second copy of the site, so that this one uses a mediaRSS file that pulls videos form a second directory, where I had taken each story and made a 1-2 minute excerpt. In the presentation, I set up the videos in my telling about it, and then could play the shorter clip.

I found an annoying glitch in my process on the plane flight to Vancouver– the new way they load CoolIris in a browser, it runs my media RSS feed through a URL at www.cooliris.com so I cannot run the show totally offline. I’m guessing they are gathering data on the feeds used, but I wish it would fail gracefully if there is no internet just to run locally like it always did before. There is no technical reason it has to run a URL through a live web site.

In addition to the CoolIris viwq of the stories, I added a long scrolling list allowing links to pull up the stories individually, and to provide web links to sites the people referenced in their stories.

I got fancier again, using some HTML/CSS/Javascript Lightbox- the method where a link opens media in a translucent layer over the page:

so this way, I can keep the experience in the same page. I’ve been using this a lot in my custom sites, and am wanting to do more writeups on how this can be effective.

Here, I made it a PHO script that opens s I can pass a file name for the FLV movie to load (using the Longtail Flash Player) as well as a download link to the same as an MP4.

The last bi I added was another link that can play all of the videos together in a single player- this uses the same Flash player, but I can pass it a playlist in XML format, so that all of the videos can be viewed in one place (using the menu at the bottom, or the track buttons on the player to advance, or just sitting back and watching).

That’s another pending blog post on using playlists for custom media sequencing….

So that’s pretty much the behind the scenes look at this presentation, which was one I just loved putting together.

And if you did not get your story in the mix… well, I am done putting them together, but you can always add them as a reply to my YouTube request.

Frankly, I know each of you has had some experience that is something that would not have happened if there was not this open space of sharing. I have dreams of seeing thousands of stories appearing, and of people dropping their fear, loathing, reluctance about sharing, and just share like mad, like crazy.

I wont promise that something amazing will happen, but as Clay said, you can be sure nothing amazing like this will happen if you don’t share.

Go out and be open. A lot of people doing that is Amazing.

It went fine, I had fun, people laughed at the Blabberize Alpaca. There is an audio recording coming from EDMEDIA, which is going to be full of me popping my p’s a bit loudly. It was a few days before that I realized I was missing a key cultural reference:

Hawaii 50+ Ways the trailer

Going into this I felt I needed something new as an angle. ED-MEDIA is a big international conference, and swirls around the thousands of papers presented. Egads, I needed something academic?

I’m really ready to hang it up and retire the shtick. This time I tried to take a tack of emphasizing some things I suggested were more important than the tools, some things I called “the craft” and aimed to hang them on some of the examples.

• A story must clearly arc to an end, to a “punchline.”
• Distill a story down to only its most necessary elements.
• If you cannot create media, modify or re-purpose.
• Think and tell in metaphors and symbols.
• Be creative within a limited tool set.
• The act of locating media is a key craft

I did get the audience to join in the group story game where they had to contribute to the prompt:

Under a Full Moon, Last Night I Saw The Strangest Thing Happen On Waikiki Beach

(as usual) it involved Elvis singing “Blue Hawaii” and then he was dancing with a shark… someone has to wrap that one up.

And also as usualy lots of people want t know what software the presentation was done in.

“That’s the web”

and it is! It’s just images, some RSS, and the CoolIris plugin– all building on what I outlined in CoolIris as a Presentation tool. It’s a bit easier now to run your own image slide shows, even from your desktop, and Scott Leslie keeps pounding at other ways to create shows– but to me, the most powerful method is rolling your own RSS feeds since you can then define the web link for each slide. That is the reason I use CoolIris as it is nearly ideal for doing presentations about web sites because of the way it moves back and forth from presentation to web and back.

A few new wrinkles I tossed in this time:

• For candy on the eye candy, I added my own logo to the CoolIiris menu bar. Easy stuff.
• Ever since May, something changed in either CoolIris or Flash (and no one is owning up) so that my previously working FLV videos that played inside the CoolIris wall now refused to play. They just spin and spin and spin, and CoolIris is not even acknowledging this as a bug. I ran an end around by doing anormal image and link to a web page– a page I created that autoplayed my flash video in a web player- e,g, http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/50ways/hawaii-50-ways.html
• Almost by accident– yes it was an accident or a typo– I found a new CoolIris trick. The normal thing is to make a thumbnail image by making copy of the full size image but smaller dimensions II do mine as 240 pixel wide JPEGs). While testing, I had noticed that I had a thumbnail of a different image than the full size- and when played in CoolIris, you get some neat transition effects. I used it on a few slides- as shown in the video below, not sure if it comes through as an effect (or a gimmick):
  cool iris trick

A few other notes on my mad methods- I do everything to avoid the inevitable Sucky Hotel Internet. So I run my presentation in a web browser, but running locally from Apache running on my MacBookPro. That makes it run a little faster. IN addition, because of the awkward pauses while waiting for web sites to load– all of the external sites I planned to use I had pre-loaded as tabs in my browser, so all I needed to do was to minimize the CoolIris interface, and flip to the right tab.

So that was 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, Hawaiian Style (pineapple and Canadian bacon??).

Book ‘em, Dominoe.

The stop at Salem was an invited session for their sixth Future is Now conference a semester end gathering for faculty to look at technology and learning, very similar to the Ocotillo gigs I previously ran at Maricopa.

Actually that had me on a double-header, first as the “post lunch wake ‘em up” plenary and right after I did a rapid fire version (45 minutes) of 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story.

So round one was The More Things Change… the more things change, a remix/reprise of a version of this I did at Scottsdale Community College in January 2009. I have some audio I recorded with my LiveScribe pen, and hesitate to post it after hearing the frequency of my “ums”. Gotta work on that.

The More Things Change… (48.9 Mb, 53:27).

As usual, people loved and asked most about the CoolIris format. Learn more on how it is done not for the feint of hand editing RSS…).

My premise is to outline how in 15+ years, so many things around us have radically been changed; my own self (showing my mullet haired youth in 1992 first year on the job at Maricopa), television, music industry, telephones, newspapers… but how little school has changed in the same span.

cc licensed flickr photo by dcJohn

It’s a set up, but to me, it really sticks out as an obvious tension point as society and culture and business are radically changed, and the process of school remains… stuck…. in an 1892 mode.

I poke some fun at Digital Native Nonsense (c’mon did we really buy that Prensky made up stuff about brains being “wired differently”? what pseudo neuroscience is that?), but tap into some generational observations about gaming, video culture (leveraging Mike Wesch videos), the rapid increases in online activity for those over 70 (and the fun of playing the Zimmers video).

my own flickr photo, do I need to attribute myself??

This time I added some more commentary on the profound Alan Kay quote on Technology being something invented after you were born– first with using the quote from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (thanks to some Kindle searching from Gardner Campbell– we had chatted about this while walking in NYC):

Here’s a tech history question: which went mainstream first, the fax or the Web? People over thirty-five had a hard time understanding why you’d even ask–the fax machine obviously predates the Web for general adoption. Here’s another: which went mainstream first, the radio or the telephone? The same people often have to think about this question, even though the practical demonstration of radio came almost two decades after that of the telephone, a larger gap than separated the fax and the Web. We have to think about radio and television [I think this is a misprint--should be "the telephone"] because for everyone alive today, those two technologies have always existed. And for college students today, that is true of the fax and the Web. Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.

And on top of that, I added with this bit about Douglas Adams’ version found of the same sentiment in Kevin Kelly’s post on Everything That Does Not Work yet

The satirist and novelist Douglas Adams further evolved Hillis and Kay’s definitions by suggesting a natural lifecycle for technologies. In a short essay in 1999 he proposed the world works like this:

1. everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3. anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Then with a very Doug Adams flourish, he adds:

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things.

I added more this time as well on the Shirky’s observation of people under a certain age ( the number does not matter) not having reservations on putting themselves online- but my slant on getting over our fear of Googled Past

Also new was more on Collective Intelligence including two I snagged from a recent ITConversations podcast that featured my colleague Hilary Mason (oh jealousy getting interviewed by Jon Udell). One was a site mentioned by Jon Patients Like Me where people share their medical issues, treatments, results so collectively one can find patterns for what works for a large number of people. I speculated what a site like Students Like Me might be able to do. Hilary is working on a neat start up called Path101 that crawls the web for resumes and parses them into data that can be used to show patterns in people’s careers and also has an intensive personality quiz so users can connect themselves with experts and data about their career paths. The other new “collective” thing I quickly mentioned was the YouTube Symphony.

For the second part of the double header, it was a 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story drive by (again, only 45 minutes) I ran it the easiest way- by preloading web pages in Firefox tabs. I trimmed a bit of the up front intro:

• PowerPoint Does Not Kill Presentations
• 50+ Ways web site
• Audience Story Prompt
• VoiceThread and Slideshare
• Paul Simon
• Dominoe 60 second story
• Dominoe Storyboard
• Dominoe flickr set
• 50+ Dominoe Stories
• Developing a Story Idea
• Salem Story Building
• Find Salem Pictures in Flickr
• Finding Media (Using images.google.com = bad)
• The 50+ Tools

The story prompt was fun, as always, a bit slow to get started. I always find some place or custom that locals know about– with some help from my host Marc, I decided to use a local bar (I had actually photographed it the day before)- “In a Pig’s Eye” so the prompt was:

You Wouldn’t Believe What Happened at Open Mic Night at In a Pig’s Eye

From what I recall the story goes–

• A Yankee fan steps into the In a Pig’s Eye bar
• The locals start chanting “Yankees Suck, Yankees Suck”
• The Yankee surprises everyone by stepping up to the open mic
• He starts to sing….

The homework was to write an ending. I thought the Yankee fan might belt out an amazing operatic aria that melts the heart of all the Sox fans present and totally defuses the tense situation.

I changed up the tool discussion, with the suggestion I had gotten at Penn State from Cole Camplese- rather than showing the same Dominoe Story in all 50 tools, I used examples from the Tools page they show how these are used by some educators. I did not get to all of them, but my list included ones listed at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/50ways/salem.html

My new emphasis is chanting, “It’s not about the tools, it’s not about the tools…” but people really like the tools (and most people were downloading and installing CoolIris by the time the show was done).

I appreciate the folks at Salem State inviting me out for the double header!

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