Yesterday I had the fun opportunity to talk about attributed and possibly [semi] serious use of the kinds of media people see/share all the time.
This session was a free pre-conference teaser for the 24th annual Teaching, Colleges and Community (YCC) conference.
That’s right, 24… and it’s still being organized by the very people who did the first one, Bert Kimura and Curtis Ho from the University of Hawaii. Maybe the best little free online conference you have never heard of.
Before I go silly, I have to do my web paleontology act to dial back to a League for Innovation conference in 2003 where this smiling man named Bert asked to talk to me about the conference. At that time, the acronym as aimed at Community Colleges, and as I was doing instructional technology work at the Maricopa Community Colleges, he gently pitched the idea of getting Maricopa to participate at an institutional level. This meant I got my office to pay a single registration fee, and any employee could take part of the online conference at no cost to them. It was a fabulous PD opportunity to offer, and we got to joke about sending so many people to a conference in Hawaii (meaning they did it from their office).
Since then…
- I did a presentation for TCC in 2004 on Photoblogging, I had just discovered flickr, but actually talked more about Buzznet and Fotolog. Hah.
- In 2005 Bert invited me to give a TCC keynote, in which I invoked a metaphor of Star Trek’s Harry Mudd to talk about Small Pieces Loosely Joined
- I was in Hawaii later that year for an NMC conference and visited Bert and his wife at home, enjoyed a local style beach dinner and a mountain hike. In a trip to Asia in 2008, I again got to visit with them for a week in Japan. These things, done well, grow into friendship.
- I also was asked to keynote in 2013, which ended up using a different metaphor for the DS106 Show (this involved me invoking a scene from Network where I urged others to do through open their browser windows and yell “I’m MOOCed as Hell and I’m Not Taking It Anymore”
- Maybe the crowning TCC was the 20th, when for the first time there was part of the conference on site in Hawaii. I got to do a keynote where, invoking Brett Victor’s talk, I time traveled back to 1996 to talk about the web. This involved me making a Yahoo T-shirt and buying a Walkman for props.
I decided in December, when the call for presentations for this year’s TCC went out, to submit a presentation- it’s actually going to be a revisit of the 2004 one and see where we have gone in 15 years in terms of communicating with shared photos.
So… when Bert and Curtis approached me last month asking if I would do the free pre-conference session they offer in March, I of course had to say yes. They said I could do the same talk, and I of course declined that offer, and pitched my silly idea.
The interest in “doing more” with media we see as entertainment (or worse) in social media goes back of course to many things DS106, but more to the studio sessions we did for the UDG Agora project- Brian Lamb led one on Meme Media: Attention-Grabbing Images And Animated Gifs and I did one one on Making Short Form Videos. It’s been a part of Networked Narratives (2017-2019). And I did a first run of Affordances of Silly Media for a group of mostly community center leaders in Melbourne Australia during my ISS Institute fellowship there in 2017.
I had lots to draw on. The platform for TCC was Adobe Connect, a platform I have not seen since leaving NMC (before 2011 then). Honestly, it’s not changed much since. I had to provide “slides” for them to upload, which of course meant, none of the GIFs moved, I just had to describe them moving and provide links (and twice during my talk Adobe Connect went down in a beach ball spiral of doom).
I thought I had packed way too much in, the Keynote presentation was 25Mb for 65 slides, many meant for fast flipping. I must have talked fast, as I got through on about 40 minutes.
We had a great audience, with folks I could see during intros from across the US, Canada, Japan, Greece (where it was 2am apparently), and even a colleague from Canberra who saw me present there in 2007.
Anyhow, I have the slides and a whole bunch of links (a lot) over in my Presentation show room
And a recording of the silliness is available on the conference web site.
At least four people took up the challenge during the talk to make meme images about TCC; thanks so much to the always eager and excited Cynthia Cologne for making and sharing them.
And thanks of course to Bert and Curtis and his TCC team plus Rebecca and John Walber from Learning Times for helping run the show.
If you are looking for a great online conference experience, check out TCC in April. The theme this year is “Sustainable Learning, Accessible Technologies, & Diverse Contexts.”
Technology, Colleges and Community (TCC), is a worldwide online conference attended by university and college personnel including faculty, research associates, academic support staff, counselors, student services personnel, students, and administrators.
Join our 24th edition of this annual event to share your expertise, experiences, and knowledge relevant to the use of information technology in learning, teaching, innovation, and academic services. This event is very helpful and “friendly” to novices. It provides you with a strong foundation about teaching and learning with modern technologies.
Featured Image: TCC2019 Meme made at imgflip using the Distracted Boyfriend pic.
