I’ve already blogged a summary of our NMC Second Life presentation over at the Campus Observer, so in this lazy state, I am reblogging myself (hey, that ping kind of tickles!). The picture below is what we did to give the Second Life participants a snapshot of what the Real Life participants in Atlanta were […]
Our second half of an NMC double-header presentation at the ELI 2007 Annual Conference in Atlanta was the official release of the 2007 NMC Horizon Report. This is the 4th year of NMC’s report on emerging technologies for teaching, learning, and creative expression, and my biased opinion (2 years on the advisory board and now part of the team that produces it) is that it again sets the mark high for a practical look at new technologies.
And high it was. We were told to expect an audience of perhaps 60, so we prepped 100 handouts, but the room overflowed, people were taking the floor seats and extra chairs brought into the back. We were told later the fire marshall had capped the attendance at 175!
So, in NMC fashion we had to do somethings fun, different, and interactive for this presentation (one of many reasons I joined NMC). In years past, the report was ready in print for the ELI conference, but this year we squeezed a bit more editing time in by releasing the PDF version at the conference, and sending out the print ones in early February. The report is provided as a PDF with Creative Commons license so other organizations and individuals can print, reuse, share, etc. So previously people saw the report and knew then what the 6 horizon topics were, but this year we had a little bit of secrecy and fun to reveal the 6 topics.
Alexander‘s laws of Hotels is upheld- the bigger, the more expensive the hotel, the more troublesome and weak is the internet connectivity. Ditto for the CNN Omni. It seems as though they throttle upload speeds to selected sites- I ftp-ed a 25 Mb audio file in 2.5 minutes, but uploads to flickr get to 68k […]
Office Panoavailable on flickr For Ewan who asked politely for this…. This is a stitched panorama of my office dine in a pile of haste before leaving town for a cross country trip. I did a quick series of overlapping photos, and not even done nicely pivoted form a good central point, put turning from […]
This is a second casted blog post– the first nicely composed, well crafted, punctually perfect one gotten eaten as the wireless network of this hotel decided it did not want to post. It’s not letting up upload photos to flickr, and I left it on “publish” when I hit the sack at 3:00 AM. Okay, […]
Crank up the Indy Junior map, I’m on the way for a 3 legged trip this week; today from Phoenix to Atlanta for the EDUCAUSE ELI Annual conference, one of my recent favorite events to attend for the caliber of folks who go, quality of program, etc. Sadly, due to the scheduling gods/demons, I get […]
This has nothing to do with new year resolves to live more organized (if that were the case I might be making lists and crossing things off), but I’ve been pleased to de-clutterize my home office, and, at the same time, make it easier to hook more gizmos to my laptop. First was getting a […]
Today there was a glut of comments in my Google Reader subscription for What Can You Do With flickr? part of the session I did in October for the K12 Online Conference, so being always in need of some ego brushes, it was pretty cool to get a long string of them — did someone […]
Hang on to your full content news feeds, this post might be a long one. I hope to try and document the under the hood as well as some of the exterior chrome work on a new site NMC just unveiled this week. This is as much for my records as anything.
But first, start with the demo, the final piece. The new site is for NMC Virtual Worlds, our new arm that provides consulting and buolding expertise in Virtual Worlds, right now focused n (but not forever) Second Life. Take a peek first at http://virtualworlds.nmc.org/ which looks almost like:
if you reload the front page, the banners as well as the case study in the lower right will change. The banner rotation is easy, something I’ve already put into the other WP power site, the NMC Campus Observer.
The needs for the site were provided rather simply as a Word document, with 6 of the present 7 major tabs. It was presented as primarily static content, but they left me room to dynamic it up, toss in some randomized aspects as well as use syndicated content. Actually, they left most of the decisions up to me, and someone else took care of the text writing (they know of my poor typing skills). I envisioned having some regularly published “news” via the blog page type, but most of the content would be static (or semi-static) WordPress “Pages” (capital P). I was also provided a logo, which gives some direction on important colors.
So the first step was looking for a template to use as a starting point.
My infatuation with Microsoft Windows is documented, and may not have changed much, but I can say I am liking very much so far the flexibility, and slick connectedness of Parallels Desktop for Mac running on my MacBookPro. This morning I gave Bootcamp the boot. Goodbye. Go back to basic training, as the new solider […]
