Me on the stage? Oh no!
Last week I was deeply immersed (3 days x 14 hours ea) in helping run an NMC Conference in Second Life. Something that has always been obvious came knock me over with a hammer obvious – there is something perversely wrong in communicating something in a 3D space using 2D slides. cc licensed flickr photo […]
modified from cc licensed flickr image by mag3737
I was pleased to be invited to give a keynote on Friday at Tulane University’s Tech Day… they run a great free event open not only to the Tulane community but they offer it to other local institutions:
Tech Day is an opportunity for the Tulane community to come together and celebrate the technology that makes life on our campus what it is. It is a day of toys, tech, food and fun. We will have academic and technical presentations as well as games and door prizes. Come show your licks at Guitar Hero or your moves in Dance Dance Revolution. Or come learn about the new trends in technology and education with presentations from our faculty and the vendors that provide us with the technology you use every day. Tech Day is free and open to the public.
A few months ago I was asked if I was interested (are you kidding? It’s in New Orleans, my bags are packed!) in speaking about social media. I was prepared to dust off and update one of my previous dog and web shows, but a few weeks back I felt like a different urge to focus on, fro among the stuff I track for the NMC Horizon Project, the up and coming buzz word seemed to be the “real time web”.
Even more vague in meaning than “Web 2.0”, I saw some wiggle room to try and make a case for some ways in which the web we know and love (maybe) right now is transforming into the next web that will be.
Maybe.
So you can catch my newest CoolIris preso at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/tulane09/ — where you will also find all the links I used and more — it was not live streamed but it was video recorder, and as soon as the crack Tulane video time puts it through the “Remove the ‘Um’ Filter and Make Him Sound Knowledgeable plug-in” I will share. I did aim to use some reach to the audience beyond who is present with some twitter shout outs, calls to respond to instant surveys, etc. I do see a lot of power in demonstrating the Audience2.0 effect.
The remote audience also missed the point towards the end where I realized I had neglected to plug in my power supply, and has my 16% battery went quickly down (luckily my friends here hustled as I tried to talk my way through the black screen of powerlessness).
But here I do a little Post Presentation Recap (where is John Madden when I need him?)
I do like to have some media running as the audience enters; this time I set up a playlist in iTunes to run through a few top videos looking at social media, including the fab new Did You Know 4 and Social Media Revolution. Mike Wesch’s A Vision of Students Today is a reliable “classic”, and I tossed in my own Rock the Academy video (hey, it is my show).
As an opening, I used something I heard in a recent presentation by Kevin Kelly, where he remarked on how much has changed in the 6000+ days since Tim Berners Lee announced the WWW (you can find this original newsgroup posting). I used the World Time Clock Date Duration Calculator to come up with 6625 days for the day I gave my presentation.
I tried to frame this against things that have radically changed, revolutionized, overturned in this time span by the web – myself (deploying my youthful mullet head from 1992), TV; telephony, publishing, music, etc and leave the hanging question- where is the parallel change in education?
I don’t carry a pat answer, but does Google know what the Real Time Web is? http://www.google.com/search?q=realtime+web? I felt like this YouTube video explained it rather clearly how it works
Not one for focusing on definitions, my aim was to provide examples, but I see some range in what this means, and dont see a lot in having a boxed in specification for it. It does not mean everything in “real time” more more near real time than we typicalyl feel. There is the real-time ness of immediacy, when we back and forth in social media conversation, the real-timeness of dynamically updating data with little or no effort, the real-timeness of the web shifting from notions of “pages” to much smaller bits of data that can be recast, reformed, visualized, passed on….
I wanted to show some things I played with recently, updating web sites with real time updated data or charts generated by Google Spreadsheets (http://cogdogblog.com/2009/08/31/google-spreadsheets/). I had set up a three column sheet, initially with 0 values (and show the chart) and asked an audience volunteer (thanks Simon!) to estimate the percentages of people responding.. I asked how many had twitter accounts, how many had facebook accounts, and how many had web enabled smart phones.
I first used some examples of things I’d looked at before as giving a sense of the web being created and expanding all the time, things that allow you to actually see it happen, including
My session yesterday at the Open Education Conference was absolutely the most fun thing I have put together for a conference. it was so fun I did not wait til the night before to finish it. The images above were totally not necessary, but I found myself up at 1:30am mocking up old covers from […]
I pulled out all the Hawaii in yer eye themes for the latest incarnation of my dog and dog show, presenting 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the EDMEDIA 2009 conference (all links mentioned in the show are just a scroll away from that link) It went fine, I had fun, people […]
I sit brain dead in a plane heading west, home, after a New England road tour with stops at Baruch College in Manhattan, Penn State University, Middlebury Vermont, and wrapping yesterday in Salem, Massachusetts. The stop at Salem was an invited session for their sixth Future is Now conference a semester end gathering for faculty […]
I’m just back from a 3 day visit to St Paul for the Midwest Library Technology Conference hosted at Macalester College.
This was the first time for this conference, and with attendance well over 250 and from the level of activity I observed, planner Ron Joslin and colleagues should be very pleased. I liked very much how they tried a variety of session formats other than 50 minute lectures (like in the Games in Libraries session we actually got to play some of the games; I might be hooked on Wii bowling after a few rounds).
I should add another noticeable feature of note at the conference was the overt effort to be green sensitive with the amount of paper generated- the program was a singl trifold, double side printed with agenda on one side and map on the other. They asked us to turn in name badges every day to re-use the paper and holders. There were no ugly conference bags stuffed with glossy ads. Its small but commendable.
My NMC colleague Rachel Smith and I were invited to do a keynote on the NMC Horizon Report; as heard this group was interested in exploring/examining emerging technologies. For our session, we took the risk and prepared a presentation in Web 2,0 beta software, the amazing Vuvox Collage (yes its still in beta and sorry no, I dont have beta invites to share.. I just asked them for an account). I was deeply inspired by the Balancing Act presentation shared a few weeks ago by Barbara Ganley, and rolled Collage into my 50 Ways tools with one about Dominoe.
So below is The 2008 Horizon Report: Key Emerging Technologies:
My first presentation today at the eLearning Guild conference was “I’m Busy Enough.. What do I Need a Second Life For?” a tact I took as I expected SL was rather outside the realm of focus for this conference.
Well, that was not fully correct, as there was a fair amount of awareness here of virtual worlds and Second Life, but when I asked the audience of 50 or so how many had Sl accounts, there were maybe 5, 7 hands raised. A number of others let me know they were there because “it sounded nothing like the other sessions my employer told me to attend” or “we’ll never use it at work but I want to know what I am missing”.
Today I spent at UBC, first an informal meeting with some course designers where Brian Lamb and I did some blog talk, and my bit from Northern Voice Not Cat Diaries / Lets Rip WordPress Apart to Make a Web Site, and an informal romp through Second Life. Then it was over to the Land […]
Ugh, will this one ever end? I decided to create an audio narrated slidecast of my 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, using the audio I recorded when I did the presentation at the 2007 NMC Regional Conference at Tulane. It took a bit more time, as I had to grab screenshots, stuff […]
Here I get to try and blog my own presentation (?). 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story presentation by Alan Levine at NMC Regional Conference at Tulane. So this is not a detailed blog coverage- pretty much as I said in the talk, the entire pile of stuff is freely, openly available for […]
