CogBlogged Tagged ‘presentations’

I’ve already blogged a summary of our NMC Second Life presentation over at the Campus Observer, so in this lazy state, I am reblogging myself (hey, that ping kind of tickles!). The picture below is what we did to give the Second Life participants a snapshot of what the Real Life participants in Atlanta were doing (hey in both worlds, they were sitting in chairs!)– but unlike the assertions of some naysayers, both audiences were rather verbal and engaged. All in all, given the multiple media inputs, outputs, etc it went amazingly well. Nary a bullet, word slide, or the essence of powerpoint was seen. The summary includes the recording of the audio.

Our second half of an NMC double-header presentation at the ELI 2007 Annual Conference in Atlanta was the official release of the 2007 NMC Horizon Report. This is the 4th year of NMC’s report on emerging technologies for teaching, learning, and creative expression, and my biased opinion (2 years on the advisory board and now part of the team that produces it) is that it again sets the mark high for a practical look at new technologies. And high it was. We were told to expect an audience of perhaps 60, so we prepped 100 handouts, but the room overflowed, people were taking the floor seats and extra chairs brought into the back. We were told later the fire marshall had capped the attendance at 175! So, in NMC fashion we had to do somethings fun, different, and interactive for this presentation (one of many reasons I joined NMC). In [...]

Since I mentioned in passing about Pachyderm, I recalled I have a small published example for those who have yet to see what it can do– this was for a panel session at the Pachyderm Users Conference, where I was asked to give some “expert” tips. I have “expert” in “quotes” since I know just enough Pachyderm t teach the basics. But I leaned back, and pulled together 3 tips, and rather than showing software in Powerpoint (again, one one of the more banal uses of PPPPPPPowerpoint), I did mine in Pachyderm itself. The demos included: Breaking Out of the Box – most images imported into Pachyderm end up as rectilinear shape (squares, squares, squares). By exploting the default white background of Pachy screens, simple cropping out of backgrounds or rotations plus drop shadows in PhotoShop add a whole lot more interest. Leveling Out audio with the Levelator – I [...]

Arggh. This is the second time I am writing this post as I inadvertantly forgot to open a new tab for a Google search. Poof! went a complete draft! Thanks to Pat D for reminding me of an owed post about an Audacity workshop I did last week. This was a hands-on workshop for the NMC 2006 Pachyderm Users Conference in Austin. For those who are elephant un-aware, Pachyderm is an open source Flash content creation tool that grew out of one developed for museums, and through a grant shepherded by NMC, has grown into a more robust tool for the wider education community. So there are Pachyderm screen templates where you can attach audio, and it works quite well to create context around some detailed content using perhaps the voice of an artist, an expert, or even member of the public’s response. So we most highly recommend using the [...]

Too much time is slipping following last week’s NMC Regional Conference in San Antonio, and BackBloggiing is slipping dangerously into “Fuggeddaaboudit”… but I would be seriously remiss without mentioning the dynamic back to back sessions by two of my all time favorite presenters- Bryan Alexander, followed by Brian Lamb- the Br[yi]an Double Header. Bryan is talking so fast, he is a blur. First up was Bryan’s firehose on Web 2.0: The Next Wave of Collaboration, Publication, and Storytelling, which, in 2.0 fashion, he posted on slideshare (wow, there were 108 slides, and we may have seen most of them!?): http://slideshare.net/BryanAlexander/nmc-2006-regional After setting a context from 18th century encyclopedias, he made a curious, now meaningful comparison between Web 2.0 and gaming, not in their characteristics, but how we react to them: Awareness is difficult… * Huge, financially and quantitatively successful worlds * Global and rapidly developing * Bad anxieties, policies, and [...]

For quite some time, I’ve interacted via blogs et al with Gardner Campbell, but today was the first time I’ve heard him present… and there he is a virtuoso. At the NMC Regional Conference, his session was on “The Allegory Efffect: Metaphoric Immersion in Croquet and Second Life”, where he put a nice connection between learning theory, literature, and the strange space of virtual worlds. We will soon have a copy of Gardner’s powerpoint posted to the conference presentation collection, and below you will find a 50 minute segment of audio from his session (I was late to start recording): http://media.nmc.org/2006/11/allegory-effect.mp3 [14.6 Mb MP3, 51:04] Gardner set a great model of presentation by first offering an open wiki for backchannel… and demonstrated his teaching approach by having volunteers from the audience read aloud some of the literature quotes he tied to his main points. Maybe this is small, but by [...]

On the heels of 2 weeks of intense NMC online conference/second life events, I’ve been relaxing for a 4 day weekend in the Arizona high country. That’s why some of the blogging is backblogging. The other thing that I did last week has have my “keynote” presentation for the K12 Online Conference. Perhaps not quite an “unconference”, I applaud the efforts of all planners, presenters, and participants for what might be considered an “alt-conference” in terms of the format. The conference place was a WordPress blog, with presentation rooms in various forms of streaming video, audio, screencasts, and what seems most interesting, more than a few wiki sites. Just thinking about it how many of the teachers involved reached for a wikispaces site to post some content is of note. When Darren asked me a few months ago to do a session, I tossed my disclaimer that I am a [...]

In some sense to parody myself (why not be the first in line?), I am writing here about a “presentation” in its most convoluted, extruded definition I recently unleashed for the K12 Online Conference… this being a request a few months ago from Darren to do a segment on “Basic/Advanced Training”. I started out on the LazyWeb trail by asking for some ideas of “cool tricks” with web tools and opening a wikispace for folks to respond. And respond they did, thanks. I was actually looking for more than saying “Flickr!” “Google Docs!”, as I was looking for more specific examples of lesser known things to do with tools that people may be aware of, but perhaps had not gone very deep with them. But hey, if you get feedback, that is a plus, and I did use some of the examples and suggestions as directions. I don’t think I [...]

Yesterday the NMC 2006 Summer Conference lifted off in Cleveland. The pre-conference institutes and workshops were in their last day; I helped out with Putting Your Hands on the Elephant: Pachyderm 2.0 a hands-on session with Pachyderm and it was great to see folks get in with the software and quickly produce sample content. 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.

Just because Gardner asked for it (and in fact it was recorded), here is a low quality, 80 minute MP3 from the session Brian Lamb and I did in Flagstaff on Social Software (or as we called it, Tag Cloud frenzy): http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/audio/nau06-keynote.mp3 [1:20:00 36.6 Mb MP3]