Small Presentations Loosely Joined

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 am providing much training (still working on getting the dog to site ;-), and more of the web 2.0 firehouse. But here it goes… one launch point is from the conference web site itself.

So what I decided to build was not a presentation in one file, movie, podcast, but to spread it all over the web… and for each web tool discussed, I tried to use it as the platform of presentation. Gimmicky? Heck yeah. So here is what is there.

To have one central place where everything is available, I posted a one page wiki site on a WikiSpaces site (this is one that is NOT open to edits. it is for my writing only): http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/k12online06

My intent was to mkae the starting point a YouTube video talking about web video, and make the paths radiate from there. But the wiki index seemed prudent. So I did a goofy, bumbling, one take video with the built in iSight on my MacBookProk, and popped it into YouTube. That sure is easy. I was hoping people might chime in with some video responses, and sure enough Beth has done so (Yea, Beth!). But of course, YouTube is but one of many players, so I set up a parallel WikiSpaces site that is open to guests to edit (stay away spammers, please?)– for each segment, so others can hlep fill in with other web video services or great teacher examples.

My desire was to embed the video into the conference page, but as a demo, I posted from YouTube directly to a blogger site, to demo that functionality.

Up next was flickr, which could easily be the enitre subject in itself– my favorite case study of what web sites, tools, services should look and feel like. What I did there was to set up a series of linked flickr content pages, each talkng about another “trick” one can do in flickr, but link them all together with flickr notes– still for some reason, a great mystery to most educators. Who can not have a need to create an image with hotspots attached? So there is a starting point that was a quickly assembled desk photo of metaphors for the things showm. There are 12 different categories hung from there, and each screen has more text, links etc. I hope I mentioned on the geotagging one the notion of not giving away your personal locations, so a few home photos are actually geo tagged to a nearby park.

I have to say, the interface for geotagging is a work of art. It seems like it was built by people who actually understand what non java coding humans might want to do.

Next up was a quick example of gliffy, my favorite new diagram maker. I made a gliffy flow chart of perhaps the process I might go through with a need to create a custom graphic…. made it in about 15 minutes, and used the tools in gliffy to get the code to pop it into a Blogger post.

Then there was doing something in del.icio.us — this was likely the biggest stretch. How to you present in del.icio.us? Easy- you figure out ahead of time all of the link you need to show, and then tag/bookmark them in reverse order– e.g . do the last screen, then the second to last,… all the way to the first one…. using a unique tag in your account– http://del.icio.us/cogdog/tastydemo. I think it works, but then again, I built it. I left a lot out– like the for: tag, and some of the other cool 3rd party apps. But it should open up some people to new ideas.

And lastly, it was something on web-based slide shows, so I used my beta account from slideshare.net to create a presentation about web-based slideshow tools, and then publish it through slideshare to my blogger site. Since it is still in beta, you cannot see the YouTube like interface or how it is able to extract all of the text on the slide to a form field so you can grab content.

And there is it is, 5 pieces of web stuff tossed out madly on the web, and likely sending many K12 educators on some wild goose chase… I have always wondered about that expression- are wild geese that much of a prize? Oh well, that is for another post to answer.

I had some fun doing this, hope it has some payoff for some others out there. We’ll see at Thursday’s Fireside chat session, when i am preparing to be pelted with stale marshmallows.

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