CogBlogged Tagged ‘presentations’

My first presentation today at the eLearning Guild conference was “I’m Busy Enough.. What do I Need a Second Life For?” a tact I took as I expected SL was rather outside the realm of focus for this conference. Well, that was not fully correct, as there was a fair amount of awareness here of virtual worlds and Second Life, but when I asked the audience of 50 or so how many had Sl accounts, there were maybe 5, 7 hands raised. A number of others let me know they were there because “it sounded nothing like the other sessions my employer told me to attend” or “we’ll never use it at work but I want to know what I am missing”.

Today I spent at UBC, first an informal meeting with some course designers where Brian Lamb and I did some blog talk, and my bit from Northern Voice Not Cat Diaries / Lets Rip WordPress Apart to Make a Web Site, and an informal romp through Second Life. Then it was over to the Land and Food Systems building where Cyprien Lomas had invited me to a brown bag lunch for another iteration of 50 Web2.0 Ways to Tell a Story that had gone over nicely at Northern Voice. Since at NV I had forgotton to click my record button, I was hoping for a recording, but Duncan at UBC had recorders, video going etc. I told ‘em that Northern Voice was the rehearsal for this session. And in a way, this was a bit smoother. I’ve usually done my presentations as one offs and repeating them is new to [...]

Ugh, will this one ever end? I decided to create an audio narrated slidecast of my 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, using the audio I recorded when I did the presentation at the 2007 NMC Regional Conference at Tulane. It took a bit more time, as I had to grab screenshots, stuff them into a PowerPoint, add the links, upload to slideshare, and THEN do the synchronization. There are a few places I missed the screens so I am talking about some things you cannot see, but worse! What a major “umm” fest this was! Ca I plead fatigue? I think it might be “49,000 Ummm Web 2.o Ways…” But here it is for your viewing torture. Man, do I like Slideshare! | View | Upload your own Okay, if you use my materials (and I hope you do)- please go to http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/50+Ways but please, please, do [...]

Here I get to try and blog my own presentation (?). 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story presentation by Alan Levine at NMC Regional Conference at Tulane. So this is not a detailed blog coverage- pretty much as I said in the talk, the entire pile of stuff is freely, openly available for use, re-use, lining bird cages at http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/50+ways. This is the workshop I prepped for workshops done during my October 2007 Australia tour. [download MP3] 51.2 Mb 1:14:05 The idea for the 50 Ways came at a time early in the summer of 2007 when I was taking notice of new web -based tools like Voice Thread and Slideshare’s Slidecasts that made it easy to create audio narrated slides shows. I knew of flickr based tools for assembling slideshows, and I began to wonder if there was a whole range of these kinds of tools. At [...]

I am done. I cannot do any more tools. I have now completed the 49th version of my Dominoe Story in 49 different web creation tools. Actually, there are 7 tools left in the trash bin that were buggy or just not worth the time. What started out as a half-thought idea in July grew into a stupidly monstrous task, but you know how it goes, set a goal, blog it, and …. This is for my 50 Web 2,0 Ways to Tell a Story workshop that gets its first test run a week from Monday in Hobart, Tasmania I have an access list of the 50 tools, links to my and other examples, and a summary of the 49 versions of my single story with notes on each tool. I have some cleanup, typo checks, and the last piece is I want to write a summary and a list [...]

With my insane schedule picking up more insanity a week from now, I really should have said, “no” when we were approached to do a session for the K12 Online Conference coming up next month. But its such a great event, all volunteer run, and speaks to everything my colleagues I and support in terms of open-ness, so Brian, D’Arcy and I said, “ok”. Besides, Darren, Lani, Sheryl, Wes, et al are just so niiiiiice. So we just posted/updated a teaser for our session on “More Than Cool Tools”. As a teaser ought to go, it teases, does not say much, and leaves you hanging at the end. That was deliberate, folks. But what pushed it nicely over the top was some rapid mixmastering by DJ Lamb, to give a routine slideshow a hip angle. Ironically, it is this ability to sync audio and slides for a web based delivery [...]

I am sidestepping some of my own blog advice by blogging something that’s not fully ready for prime time. Among my frantic evening time prep work for my October Australia tour, I am starting to weave together workshop / presentation materials I’ll likely leak here first to get some feedback. What seemed like an off the cuff idea, and mostly because I just liked the title, I am working on a workshop activity called “There Must be 50 Web2.0 Ways to Tell a Story” – the premise being to introduce participants to at least 50 sites that allow them to assemble at least two kinds media as a story and republish it to other web sites. About a week or so of digging around got me at least 54 candidates. So for those missing the musical allusion here, it is a nod to the elegant lyrics of Paul Simon, re-purposed [...]

My Faculty Academy presentation “Being There: nets, tweets, avatars” is getting some eyeballs where it is sitting in slideshare. Just got a note that it is now listed on their featured presentations page and has me thinking I should comb back through and make sure I’ve not done something typical like mispelling my own name ;-) I am blushing, this dog is shy and hates attention. I might need to take a bath now or comb my hair. I like what slideshare does, that it can YouTube like be embedded into web pages and blog posts and is the only, only, ONLY, O-N-L-Y reason I would ever touch Powerpoint, but with its lack of embedding URLs, it really is less useful as a sharing platform than the slides posted in flickr. C’mon, slideshare, give us hyperlinks!

Yesterday I co-presented as part of four amigos for MacLearning Environments on (Many, Too Many?) Small Technologies Loosely Joined: Open, Connected, and Social. This was carried out via Elluminate hosted at the University of Calgary. The players were D'Arcy Norman, Brian Lamb, myself, and Jim Groom and we had a nice peppy crowd show up there. When we brainstormed our topic, we ended up nostalgic and reflective of a show three of us did way back in 2004 on connecting decentralized web content with RSS — “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”– and almost laughing at how primitive some of the tools were back then! But the approach still rings true for us, maybe even more so today, that the path is not with large controlled systems, but the use, re-use, of separate systems and tools that we can connect using powerful underlying protocols like RSS and OPML. The approach for discussing [...]

Yesterday was a eventful day at the CNI Spring Task Force Meeting. My travel arrangements for this conference were pretty tricky — I got in my truck and drove 20 miles downtown to Phoenix. No lost luggage. This was my first ever attendance at a CNI conference; a different flavor of colleagues, so I got to meet a lot of new folks in the library and information architecture fields. My hats off to Clifford Lynch and colleagues who arrange a program that is interesting, not dense with too many sessions, and leaves room for the critical hallway meetings. And there is the touch of Cliff’s Roadmap, which provides a wonderful context for the 2 day meeting. A highlight was getting to co-present with co-conspirators Bryan Alexander and Cyprien Lomas. We did a session on the NMC’s Horizon Report, of which they were both involved as advisory board members, What’s in [...]