The morning session for Friday at the 2005 NMC Summer Conference was a combination of the Center for Excellence awards and the NMC special Five Minutes of Fame session.
The Center for Excellence are awarded to three institutions as a recognition for their efforts (we were fortunate to get on one 2003)- this year recognizing UC Chico, University of Texas, and Wesleyan University. Each center gets their unique lucite statue, and during the ceremony each shows a 5 minute video providing more information about what they day. The stuff in the videos is just outstanding, and many of them have a lot of fun in creating the videos (the best were the “ribs” scenes from University of Texas, as well as the outakes of their provost yelling in surprise, “you’re going to HAWAII! No one told me you were going to HAWAII!”). The projects from UC Chico were impressive- a fully immersive 3D animation of their campus, a locally invented video camera rig that allowed them to shoot video from a camera operated by a remote control that slid down a suspension line (it was shown swooping over the river that runs through campus). And Weslyan has honored for their efforts in learning objects and ways they are shared.
But the fun is in the 5 minutes of fame- these are extreme demos where presenters get exactly 5 minutes to do a demo, and anything over 5 gets “gonged” and must stop immediately. I presented one on Feed2JS that was well received (and yes, I got gonged. I like getting gonged). I created a mini presentation for this session that is built using Eric Meyers fabulous S5 slide show template:
This template provides a set of CSS and javascript files that generate the entire slide show from one simply formatted HTML file. I spent a little bit of time on the flight out here customizing the layout, but it offers most everything you get in PowerPoint except the bloat- it runs online, and it is totally web standard, has keyboard shortcuts for slide movement, a drop down navigation menus, and a link to a web accessible text version.
