The New Media Consortium Spring 2004 Online Conference was come and gone this week. I am still favorable of the format, and its mix of streaming presentations, asynchronous discussions, and live chat sessions- most online conferences throw so many sessions and event son the pile that you get overloaded. The NMC ones have had a nice balance, though the participation in this recent one was much less active than the first one in October 2003.

Anyhow, my keynote on “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange” was there, it turned out to be a 52 minute guided tour of the MLX by that energetic tour guide, Biff Cantrell. I am thinking now it was way long, but I wanted to represent all of the facets and features inside and around the MLX, from our promotion efforts, to IP issues, from hardware to software, from TrackBack to RSS. That is the thing about an online conference is you do not see the audience, so you cannot tell if they are bored, reading their email, blogging, or in a trance. You just let a presentation fly, like an arrow lofted in the air, and sometimes you hit the mark and sometimes you miss.

Maybe the jury is till out, but I have installed a copy of this presentation on our site, so if you have an hour to kill (actually with Breeze you can easily pick your way through the show), go take Captain Biff’s Tour of the MLX. Again, Macromedia Breeze does an amazing job of taking a 70 MB PowerPoint and making it something viewable as a streaming media presentation even on a 56k dial-up.

This morning was the release of my keynote on “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange” at the New Media Consortium Spring 2004 Online Conference. This turned out to be a 52 minute Breeze presentation, weighing in at a 70.5 Mb in authored PowerPoint, but a streaming 15 Mb via Breeze delivered Flash.

At 9:30 Am PST was the scheduled audio teleconference, which is a little of an odd format because the call in participants hear me via the audio telephone bridge, but post questions via the conference chat, and host Larry Johnson relayed them to me. Actually it kind of works well, and was a fast 30 minutes. The audio has been posted to the conference site.

It was good to see some new names and institutions listed in the chat area. I am guessing, but maybe there was disappointment that my vague reference to “franchising” was not the unveiling of a “Download MLX Source Code Here” link. I am hoping there is some more conversation about this.

At least on the fun side, there was an inquiry as to the whereabouts of the MLX tour guide “Biff Cantrell”….