Wow, what a great day it was yesterday to be back at my old stomping grounds but this time as an invited speaker for the Maricopa Teaching & Learning with Technology Conference which has become a great regional event, as they had attendees from Arizona State University, Coconino Community College, I heard even people came from Texas (?).
Mike Wesch was an amazing speaker, and beyond his YouTube fame are some amazing projects he is doing with students generating learning content (check out the world culture sim) in all the good Web 2.0 ways (love his use of netvibes). We got interviewed by Veronica Diaz for a podcast that should appear somewhere on the maricopa conference site.
Mike’s morning keynote was a great leadoff for my Being There presentation, the first of two I did yesterday.
This was a 3td generation version of the one first done last year for Faculty Academy and then last October in Australia. I must admit to managing the time as well, because I ended up about 14 slides short of the finish line. But I was having too much fun.
I did a number of things to try and capture the presentation- I had set up my Edirol audio recorder so I have the audio now synced to the slides, posted to Slideshare (and tried to make the notes liberally commented and linked):
And have the audio as well:
Being There @ Maricopa (35.4 Mb MP3, 51:29)
I maintain this is about the best way to capture a presentation, but its some effort to do the recording and sync, And OMG, the “um” filter was not working at all.
Also for te novelty of it, and to see if I could pull it off, while presenting, I was running a live ustream.tv broadcast, partly to show the audience that this was possible, and the use of twitter as a “call out” to people to join the ustream. I had barely enough time to test (once they got me a wired connection which was much more robust than the wireless). I find that the laptop camera option is not always optimal, and ince you are in presentation mode, you are not able to monitor the stream at all.
For this one I tried an experiment- I had the camera on only at the beginning as I was getting set up, and then I switched the video source to CamTwist, an utterly amazing tool (free, Mac OS X) that turns your desktop into a video source. So I was streaming (I thought) the presentation.
The video was likely not optimal as it is small, and I had forgotten I had dropped the video quality settings in ustream, as typically I like to hedge my quality to audio. Sorry folks out there trying to remotely read pixelated slides. But here is the recorded archive:
I still find myself in sheer amazement that this is even possible, for free. Never in all my dreams.
I was so sorry I did not get to the Amazing Flower story or my bit on Nuggets vs Fishing. Maybe I’ll just have to sit down and record the whole thing the way it ought to … ah right, like that will never happen!
Among the neat sidelights was meeting Sean, who is at ASU and is one of the people in the flickr 366 photos group
And then, in the next post, the details on the 50 ways presentation.
