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 […]

My friend and colleague Donna Rebadow, teacher extrordinaire at Paradise Valley Community College, is spearheading an effort at “Bridging the Digital Divide”. As the Pam Te Project, she is hoping in June to travel to Chiapas Mexico, with a load of donated used laptops to support the education of Mayan students: There are 60 young, […]

(yes, something not related to spam) I had seen and recommended before the British Library’s Turning the Pages site, but was recently reminded of it in an email exchange. To me this is one of the prime examples of what the Internet can provide- a rich interactive experience with a resource that would not be […]

Just posted the web version of our once per semester publication, the mcli Forum which our office has been publishing in print and paper since 1993 (before 2000 it was the Labyrinth-Forum). We have a mixture of faculty, guest, and our own staff authored articles that highlight teaching, learning, assessment, and technology efforts at Maricopa. […]

Joe Moxley, English faculty at the University of South Florida created Teaching Wiki, rolling with a good set of examples and specific ideas of how teachers and students might (and are) using wikis: Teaching Wiki aspires to be a community for college-level faculty. We imagine our primary audience to be faculty who are interested in […]

And now for something completely irrelevant, but dear our heart (see our blog top tagline): Found at Red Ferret’s Dog Blog by way of Smartmobs. But what serendipity again. The Red Ferret Journal is rich with images and cool toys. Better furl it now. The Ferret is a weblog which looks at gadgets, software, web […]

Sometime recently we passed another milestone in the 10th year of continuous web presence by our Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction. In Spring of 1994 we were doing support for faculty at South Mountain Community College in helping them get started with a local “center” for teaching, learning, and technology– we had convinced the […]

Over at Common Craft, you can now find Wikis Described in Plain English: You may have seen the word “wiki” used to describe a website used by a group to collaborate. My intent with this post is to describe wikis and the basics of how they work- in plain English. It is not bad, but […]