At least someone out there is reading my drivel. Todd Slater responded to the call for CSS Bonsai Gardens and quickly shared a new style available for anyone, “ZanestatefeedsYahoo”. I added some tweaks that allow me to share a demo of what this new feed looks like. Check it out! Thanks Todd, first out of […]
More and more I have needed a Mac OSX SFTP client for moving web content to various servers- we have knocked off open FTP on all of our web servers, and I need it now for loading content to SourceForge. Pity that my long friend Fetch, used since the early 1990s, has yet to jump […]
I just cleaned up a bug in a golden oldie web site, and it is playing music again. The Interactive FlipSite was created so long ago I cannot remember exactly for sure, at least before 1998. The purpose was to create a site to illustrate simple probability for basic mathematics using the most simple of […]
A month a go I barked rather severely about the disappearance of XPlana’s blog — I thought there was a comment but maybe it was a private email from someone there (?? my brain is mush, I cannot recall who it was) that fessed up that links to the new site were absent, and also […]
I am enjoying the last leg of a nice long vacation at our cabin in the pine forests near Strawberry, Arizona. Not unique in the west or elsewhere in the world, we are in the ninth year of a drought, and the forests are bone dry. Just 10 miles to the south, the Willow Wild […]
Just saw this at the NMC 2004 5 minutes of Fame- a nifty app for creation of interactive timelines- presentation is via Flash (of course), but data driven by XML. Created by the Center for Educational Resources at Johns Hopkins, the Timeline Creator is a freebie for downloading and provides what looks like a simple […]
Sigh, the dog has been a lazy conference blogger, too much scenery in Vancouver, good food and drink, to have enough energy to continually blog the sessions, Fortunately, others are feverishly at it, see the blog aggregator created by Stephen Downes. NMC continues to he my favorite confence for the people who come, for the […]
James Farmer has shared an interesting idea of building a collection of audio “readings” of articles, and Stephen Downes has taken the idea and ran it as an online audio jukebox. I’m not much of an avid reader of academic articles, so I let is slide into the “neat idea but no time to bother” […]
Philosophical question: If a presentation falls in the woods, and there is no one there, does it make a sound? Or for that matter, if you miss a conference presentation, does an abstract, a paper, or even the PowerPoint itself really provide information (worth the weight, er… wait, of the download?)
Like Jay Cross’s recently posted audio narrated ASTD presentation, we had done the same for a keynote presentation by Diana Oblinger at our May 18, 2004 Ocotillo Retreat — it is part of my compulsion to make sure we have materials from our events that can be useful afterward, and for those who were not there.
First of all, it certainly helps to have a compelling speaker, and Oblinger has done that again on a second visit in 2 years to Maricopa (see Into the Future: What is IT?, Feb 2002).
Recently named as a Vice President of EDUCAUSE, Oblinger always brings practical ideas, real examples, research data, and useful strategies tailored to meet the topics of our sessions, and to boot, always manages to deliver them as well balanced (text vs graphics) in PowerPoint as you can get. And she is so personable and enthusiastic.
Her talk for us was The Paradox of Agility and Stability— addressing the issues of the changing demographics of learners, appraches sucvh as games and simulations, trends in assessment, instituional strategies for change….
Knowing ahead of time she would be willing to provide the PowerPoint, we had set her up for the presentation with a microphone to record her audio (we just recorded it into a Canon GL/1 DV camera, just the audio). Afterward, this was digitized quickly into iMovie, and exported as .WAV files. Then it was a jump across the room to my PC to open the presentation in PowerPoint, access the Macromedia Breeze sound editing menus to import the audio, and then synchronize the slide frames with the audio. As an additional bonus, since Oblinger had provided us references for many of the data sources used in the presentation, we were able to add them as hyperlinks.
Thanks to a friend inside Blackboard, I got a peek a few weeks ago at a Building Block (plug-ins for Blackboard) that provides a wiki functionality inside the Blackboard environment. I’d put up some screen shots, but the Bb Showcase site seems to be offline right now. What was interesting was the shying away from […]
