presentations
One of the things that will ring in my ears, for as long as I live, is David Jakes taking just about everyone to task for hanging out in the library of the Science Leadership Academy while teaching, learning, and interacting with students was going on in the classrooms around the corner during EduCon 2.0.
Yes that’s me, behind the Mac in gray shirt and tie, in the infamous library bantering about twitter.
Although I feel lucky that I got out of the library for a bit to see advisory in action at SLA, Jakes words are not something that I’ll ever forget and it’s something that’s changed what I do at conferences.
I’ll never pass-up the opportunity to chat up a kid at a conference.
If you’re wondering what that looks like:
It looks like working alongside students in the OpenSource Pavilion at NECC.
It looks like talking to this group of kids in Seattle about how they’re using technology, inviting them to my conference session, and then later being interviewed by them for their school project.
It looks like ditching a conference to see Ben Wilkoff’s classroom because you’re within a $40 cab ride each way (and your per-diem will just about cover that) so you can see teaching and learning in action instead of a bunch of people talking over PowerPoint about why they’re so great.
When I walked in to present at this local conference for school level technology coordinators and saw these signs everywhere:
I knew I needed to talk to some kids:
As usual the kids know the score. In case that’s not good enough for you and you want to hear the same message from someone who wears a tie to work you can get that here:
Technorati Tags: David Jakes, EduCon 2.0, Embrace MySpace, presentations, The Kids are Alright
During the next week I have the opportunity to make a few SlideCasts. Here’s the first in a series of three:
I’m not in love with this presentation. I hate presenting about things that I don’t feel like I know inside and out. I don’t know this advisory thing as well as I wish I did, but I do know that the concept of it is something that would be great for building community at our school.
Also it was a bit embarrassing that my math skills fell apart (listen to the last five minutes), but that’s about par for the course. I thought to myself about one-hundred times, “I should have someone else eyeball this” and then I looked up and it was time for the presentation.
Before I left on Friday, I sent the SlideCast to my staff. Sunday evening as I write this it’s been viewed 100 times and downloaded 7:
I wish that Google presentations was as social.
Later this week: a presentation that I am giving for NACOL with Cory Plough and a presentation on social software that I’m giving to the teacher computer specialists for my encompassing school district. If either of those things are your thing, check it out.
Technorati Tags: advisory, administration, slidecast
I was involved with two sessions at this year’s Faculty Technology Days conference on campus. The first one was a keynote panel on “Social Networking in the Academy” and the second was “Weblogs as Personal Repositories.”
Social Networking in the Academy
When we were planning the Social Networking panel, we realized that some of the faculty members might not be familiar with social networking, or with some of the aspects or implications of it, so we thought it would be a good idea to start the 2-hour panel session with a brief introduction to the topic so we were all on similar pages. Being the geek in the group, I volunteered to take that on. I wound up giving about a wiki-powered 25 minute intro to social networking (what it is, what it means, some samples, etc…).
This was followed by Paul showing some of the really cool stuff the library is doing with social networking (specifically, the Facebook groups for MacKimmie and Health Sciences libraries, and ad campaigns). Those librarians, I tell you. Always doing cool stuff to make their resources easily available to students and faculty…
Maria spoke about some of the issues she sees, specifically pertaining to compelling students to publish and engage in a highly commercialized and privacy-invasive environment. Maria also asked one of her grad students, Todd Andre, to join the panel, and it was great to hear some of the perspectives from the other side (as opposed to just making educated guesses).
After taking a few minutes for the participants to warm up, the session turned into a great discussion about social networking, covering a pretty broad range of topics. We talked about the geek stuff. We talked about intellectual property. Creepy Treehouse. Digital identity. Network as People. It was a really fun, interesting, and vibrant discussion. And we could have used another 2 hours because we had to wrap it up just as people were really getting into it.
Paul streamed the whole thing live via UStreamTV, and the video archive is still there.
Weblogs as Personal Repositories
It seems like every year, I get designated to “do a talk on blogging.” Usually, I try to focus on the reasons to do it - the network effects, contributing to the community, etc… This year, I decided to appeal to people’s sense of pragmatism. Blogging primarily as an outboard brain, for organizing and searching information that is important to you. And, secondarily, as a way to share information with others.
I think that was the right angle to take, but I’m not sure my implementation worked out very well. It’s still a pretty broad topic. I tried to do as much live demo as possible, showing concrete examples of how it works. I also created 2 blogs (one on WordPress.com and one on Blogger.com) to show what that looks like. The resources and links were all powered by a wiki page as well. Another form of outboard brain, but I used an institutional variation for this one.
I think the session went well. It wasn’t stellar, but I think people at the bare minimum got that blogging as an activity of documentation and organization can be an important way to manage the volume of information we have to deal with. If even one of them winds up starting a new blog, I’ll consider the session a success.
Yesterday I gave a presentation to the staff of the high school from which I graduated.
It wouldn’t be so odd to go back to the high school you used to work at and give a presentation, but to go back to my high school, the one I graduated from, stand on the stage I was last on acting in a play, and present to
- Some of my former teachers
- Some of the people I went to school with who also grew up to be teachers and came back home to teach
about how to bring social software into their classes was, well, a little surreal.
It was good to touch bases with my former teachers. Along with the core area teachers that managed to get a horrible student through their classes, there was also
- the art teacher that taught me more than can be believed about graphic design and layout
- the music teacher that taught me how to play guitar, something I do every day
- and the theater teacher that simply put me in plays and out in-front of people at a young age
I have fond memories of the school that was my second chance at high school graduation. When I was asked to put on the dog and pony show I figured it would be one last time and I was happy to do so.
I’ve done this presentation on using social software nine times, in five states, since November. The groups have varied from teachers, to business people, to technology coordinators, to student groups and I’m ready to put this thing to bed. I was a little bummed that I was finishing on what I felt wasn’t my best showing (there’s nothing like fumbling with a mic in one hand while trying to use your computer remote in the other in-front of a crowd) but it felt good being done. During my presentation I got this email on my phone:
Glenn: Is there any chance you would be able to replicate your NASA presentation “My Space” in a 30 minute presentation at the upcoming charter school conference on Friday, May 2, 2008? If so, then would you kindly send me the exact title at 2-3 sentence description?.
The “upcoming charter school conference” that is being referred to here is “Governor’s Summit On Charter Schools” being held at the state capital May, 2nd. Can’t really say no to that, can I? Could you?
So, that’s how I ended up getting involved with the governor. That and I’m designing the web-site for the Governor’s Commission on Charter Schools: Nevada Public Charter Schools. That story another time.
Technorati Tags: charter schools, embrace myspace, presentations, governor
I have to echo Cog Dog’s sentiment and hail Tony Hirst’s Feedistan. It is beautifully riffing on the theme of Non-Programistan, a crazy concept presentation Tom and I dreamed up. I have a feeling the fearless leaders of this beautiful republic will be responding to Feedistan in the near future in their usual grand and over-the-top style.
In the meantime, I would just like to take a moment to thank everyone at the New Media Consortium (particularly Larry, Alan, and Rachel) for putting on a great mashed-up symposium, despite the Chernobyl-like fallout from this presentation. The fact that they considered (no less allowed) us to push the limits of presentation etiquette to such a degree –I think the best part of the presentation may be Alan’s over-the-top introduction—testifies to just how far they will stretch the definition of innovation and creativity. They have made the presentation available here, against all common sense, propriety, and love for all things holy! —just remember that you have been warned. I’m sure our accents and the technical difficulties pissed off more than a few participants, yet in the end I think this presentation is the beginning of something new and exciting, at least for me.
And while it can’t compare with the truly artistic work of Brian’s mind-blowingly wonderful “Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist,” (or even Tony’s Feedistan response for that matter) the “b” nature of Non-Programistan is very appealing to me and may call for many, many more experiments along these lines. And while I don’t expect organizations like NMC to make their constituency suffer through such antics a second time, I do hope we can find another venue for such truly un-artistic expressions of EdTech, say perhaps a WPMu installation 
Michael Geist gave a talk at The University of Calgary on April 2, 2008, on the subject of copyright. He talked about the need for Fair Dealings, the dangers of the Canadian DMCA, and even touched on the benefits of open access and even open education.
Dr. Geist’s presentation was very compelling, interesting, and engaging. I believe he was able to communicate the benefits of less-restrictive copyright, and am hoping he helped plant some seeds to get an open content movement going here at The University of Calgary.
The video was recorded by Paul Pival, who used his very handy MacBook iSight Inverter Mirror to properly record the session without having to snap the lid off of his laptop. The sound was recorded by a microphone placed on the floor near the podium, so hopefully it didn’t turn out too badly. I thought it was interesting that an event like this wasn’t “officially” recorded, and it was trivially done by an attendee bringing a laptop to the session. The days of requiring enterprise support for event recording and broadcasting are over.
Tom Woodward and I will presenting at NMC’s Symposium on Mashups tomorrow what may very well be the most insane presentation I have yet to be a part of, namely “Welcome to the People’s Republic of Non-Programistan.” The way I look at it, this will either be wildly successful or a terrible failure, for we haven’t left room for much in between — which is what I like about.
As Tom already said here, we are using a visual and performative Mashup of Communist art and rhetoric to examine a few tools and framworks that allow you to mashup resources from around the web without writing a lick of code. I have been working fiercely on my fake Russian accent all evening, and I hope I can pull it off convincingly by tomorrow evening.
This has truly been one of the most entertaining presentations I have yet to work on, and the framing of the presentation as a blog/website/resource was a large part of the enjoyment. Tom did all of the aesthetic design and a lion’s share of the work all together; he is truly one of the most hard-working, imaginative, and hilarious people I have yet to meet, working with him both at UR and on this proposal has been a total ball.
So, tomorrow at 5:00 pm (EST) we lay it all on the line, and introduce the uninitiated to the wonderful world of Non-Programistan!
Over the last month I was a proud member of two different presentations with the same title, “Don’t call it a Blog, Call it an Educational Publishing Platform.” The whole idea behind these presentations was to highlight the immense possibilities open source web publishing tools like WordPress Multi-User and Drupal afford educational institutions for creating a wide-range of web-based content easily and attractively (well, at least with WordPress ). Moreover, this model puts the power in the hands of the authors, which in turn could provides the possibility for a far greater level of educational openness. These are platforms that provide many, if not all, of the possibilities of more traditional LMSs, but exponentially move beyond them given the fact that they benefit from huge open source communities that are constantly enhancing the applications.
The idea for this paper was inspired by a comment by Brian on a post about the limitations of one of the most “promising” open source LMSs: Sakai. And I’ll repeat it here, because it is well worth repeating and I can;t begin to say it as eloquently:
I’m reminded of something George Siemens said at a symposium on distributed tool strategies: that schools should be in the business of managing data flows rather than in supporting an end to end user experience. We can only dream what might result if the energy going into the campus-wide LMS’s would go into creating flexible and easy to use “syndication buses” or to addressing pragmatic instructor challenges to using the “small pieces” approach — things like student management tools, gradebooks etc. And what about providing the service of institutional archiving and data backups to mitigate the risks of using third party tools?
The syndication bus and the small pieces loosely joined philosophy are germane to thinking about tools like WPMu and Drupal (and many others I know nothing about) as the robust and flexible publishing platforms of th future more genrally, and for education specifically.
Northern Voice 2008: “Don’t Call it a Blog”
So, after this long drawn out introduction, I give you two presentations by some of my favorite people in the world. The first was at Northern Voice 2008, and was a four person mashup of ideas and approaches, featuring Brian Lamb, Bill Fitzgerald, D’Arcy Norman, and myself. It was an intense presentation that took a strong shot at traditional ways of thinking about web-based learning, and it lays out a wide range of resources that are available to an educational environment that is ready and willing to seek for alternatives. We haven’t collected all of our resources in one place, but hopefully this may provide us an opportunity to drop them in a wiki page, and link out to it. I’ll update this post with a link if we get to it sometime. Unfortunately the first ten minutes of this presentation was lost, so Brian’s unbelievably funny and poignant examination of traditional LMSs and their alternatives will have to just be imagined, or at least anticipated when the Lost Abject tapes re-emerge sometime in the distant future —kinda like the Beatles archive, but with more edge
Download Northern Voice, 2008 presentation “Don’t call it a blog…”
ACCS 2008: “Don’t Call it a Blog” Take 2
The second incarnation of this presentation was particularly special for me in many ways. Let me count them now. I presented with Andy Rush and Jerry Slezak, two of my then former colleagues at Mary Washington, and now once again current colleagues. it was during a Skype call with Jerry in which we were talking about this presentation (for I had recently begun working at the University of Richmond), that I realized just how much I missed my old job and that I didn’t want to start from scratch again, but rather desired to keep pushing the envelope with an amazing group of thinkers that I had somehow found myself no longer a part of. So, this presentation in many ways marks the occasion of my return to UMW.
Yet, at the same time it marks the beginnings of whne the DTLT group at UMW started to really flesh out its identity, and move aggressively towards Small Pieces Loosely joined. It was during a presentation at ACCS two years ago that the entire DTLT group presented the BlueHost experiment and all the possibilities it afforded an innovative group of instructional technologists. It was, in retrospect, a landmark moment for me, and going to that conference as a part of UR in 2008 somehow seemed wrong, not for any reason specific to Richmond, but rather for my own investment in the magic that is UMW. So this presentation was once again a special reminder of how much more important it is to be a part of a great team, rather than immersed in your own sense of what things should be. The two can co-exist, and in many ways that is the definition of a great team, and returning to UMW may have been one of the smarter thing s I have ever done, I’ll take the crap (though there has been surprisingly little, for the unbelievable rewards in provides.
So, now that I listed the ways, Andy, Jerry and I created a nice resource for this presentation that not only illustrates our point, but also provides a nice list of resources for all the sites and concepts we covered during the talk. Andy featured his work on the multimedia marvel that is the Great Lives site, a series of taped lectures given at UMW as part of the Great Lives Lecture series that are being made freely available given the joy that is UMW Blogs. I talked about UMW Blogs — are you surprised? And Jerry, the voice of eternal reason, discussed the implications of such a publishing model for universities more broadly, examining the possibilities of external hosting, eduCampus, and much more. It was a real joy to deliver with these guys, and I am ever so happy to be back home!
Download ACCS 2008, “Don’t Call it a Blog…”
Eventhough I have some reservations about speaking at a vendor sponsored event, and they have me jumping through some crazy hoops which my twitter crew had some great reactions to:
I will be speaking at CiTE 2008 this Wednesday at 3:00 MST. This means that I will be missing the first night of the 3rd Round of OpenPD, but it also means that during my presentation I’m going to talk that up a lot and I’ll probably even try to stop by to get Darren and Robin to say “hi” live.
If you’re there and would like to broadcast via UStream or manage a back-channel for me (or maybe both?) let me know. I’ve tried doing this on my own several times and just can’t seem to manage. I’d like to blame it on how hard it taxes my system resources, but come on, let’s be honest the problem is right here on the sitting side of the computer. I believe my IT guys call it PICNIC (problem in chair not in computer).
In the meantime I’m inviting people to go edit my bio. Make it fun. Make it funny. Make it whatever you want. It’s my bio but it’s on an open wiki, so go for it.
Technorati Tags: cite, cite2008, open biography project
If things are little more sparse here for a little while it’s because I’m out trying to set the world ablaze. I’ve spent enough time thinking about it.
Technorati Tags: thought leader, 15 december, I can’t believe that I didn’t know that there was a SXSW technology conference as well as a SXSW music fest
