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“Building the MLX…” presentation

Faithful CDB readers get this early glimpse at Building an Innovation Collection (with a bit of Competition and Bribery), a presentation for Monday, October 20, at the League for Innovation Conference on Information Technology in Milwaukee.

This is less a technical presentation and more about the strategies we have used to (try and) build up our collection, as well as some words from faculty who are using the MLX.

My co-presener, Charlene Thiessen, is a faculty member from GateWay Community College who has been one of our local MLX advocates. Our program blurb reads:

The Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) is an electronic warehouse of ideas, examples, and resources that support learning at the Maricopa Community Colleges, represented as mysterious wrapped “packages”, from a Flash animation for a chemistry lab to a faculty development program. See how we tripled our collection with a friendly competition for software prizes. Learn how we are syndicating content with RSS news feeds.

As part of this…

I updated a part of the presentations I do on the MLX that provide a tour of the “loading dock”, the place where Maricopa people create their MLX items. Because you need an account to go inside the dock, I had used a static series of screen shots to do a quick tour.

But because of our presentation this week at the NMC online conference on learning objects, I have access to Macromedia Breeze which can take PowerPoint authored content and convert it to a slick streaming Flash presentation.

So in about 45 minutes worth of time, I grabbed some screen shots, dumped them into a simple PPT file, (walked away from my Mac over to a PC), and then recorded the audio narration (adding a few stepped animations for content to appear). I upload it to ther Breeze server, where it is compressed and converted to a series of .swf and other assorted xml and .js files, and thehn I am able to download it for playback from my own server.

It is really bone-head simple.

Okay, you have gotten this far down the blog- now you can take the tour.

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An early 90s builder of web stuff and blogging Alan Levine barks at CogDogBlog.com on web storytelling (#ds106 #4life), photography, bending WordPress, and serendipity in the infinite internet river. He thinks it's weird to write about himself in the third person. And he is 100% into the Fediverse (or tells himself so) Tooting as @cogdog@cosocial.ca