Rumors are that elusive character, Biff Cantrell, will be appearing at the New Media Consortium Spring Online Conference (March 8-11, 2004).
The NMC Series of Online Conferences is a new form of meetings based on social computing concepts and delivered entirely online through a collaboration with NMC partners iCohere and Macromedia. The unique environment allows the NMC to explore emerging topics with participants attending from their home or office as their schedules permit, yet still interacting and participating in significant ways.
The Spring 2004 Online Conference will focus on three tracks:
- Digital Rights Management/ Creative Commons Licensing
- Learning Applications for Blogs & RSS
- Focus on Excellence: Innovative Ideas & Applications
I attended and presented at the first NMC online conference last October (the theme was Learning Objects), and having attended (and often tuned out) of other online conferences, found the format of this one very useful and flexible. Best of all, as a presenter, I was provided access to the Macromedia Breeze presentation tool which does a fantastic job of allowing one to author in PowerPoint (not exactly a selling point for me) quite easily and publishing it not as a big fat lumbering PPT, but a svelte, streaming audio narrated Flash show. See the show I did with Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman (assembling with Breeze from here in Arizona and two Canadian provinces) “Connecting Learning Objects with RSS, Trackback, and Weblogs”
As a scary enough thought, I was invited by NMC leader Larry Johnson do do a keynote presentation at the March online conference. The wraps are still on it, but we are providing a session on “Mysteries Revealed: Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange”, a look in detail at how the MLX works, the technology pieces that tie it together, and some of the strategies we have used to build up our collection of educational resources and ideas.
Our fearless tour guide, Biff Cantrell, will lead you through the virtual warehouse, down to the depths of the code, out to the loading dock, up to the syndication tower, over to the MLX Legal department, and into the Marketing Department.
That’s the pitch. I highly recommend the online conference- the format is not one that ties you up all day trying to tune into buletin boards or chat sessions- the Breeze presentations can be viewed any time during the day, and you can choose to tap into the live scheduled sessions to communicate with presenters. It is fairly cheap too. For more details on the conference, go to:
http://www.nmc.org/events/2004spring_online_conf/index.shtml
Now I have to go and see what trouble Biff has gotten into.
