I had the chance to work on a presentation for the K12 Online 2007 conference. Alan, Brian and I started by thinking of doing an updated “Small Pieces” piece, and we wound up creating a 53 minute video presentation touching on 9 trends in successful online tools, and how they might be used effectively.
The trends are, in no real order:
embed
connect
socialize
collaborate
share
remix
filter
liberate
disrupt
Here’s the presentation, hosted in chunky Google Video transcoded format. There are links to higher (and lower) res versions on the K12 conference page for the presentation.
There’s a live “fireside chat” Elluminate session scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 20 at 1pm GMT (which is 7am here in Calgary - so much for my day to sleep in…)
I’m thinking of writing up a blog post describing the process we used, which worked out surprisingly well (except for my inability to properly normalize all of the audio - sorry!). Final Cut Pro was used to pull together audio, images, and video from 3 presenters, and spit out the final product. I learned a LOT about using FCP during the process, and think I could do it much quicker (and better) next time around…
Our Out of Print session went off pretty well (I think) this morning. Jim worked his usual Bavamagic, weaving early American history, WordPress, wikis, and student conversations into a pretty cool demo. Then, I showed some of the OpenContentDIY resource site, and rambled unexplicably for about 25 minutes. From what I remember, I either sounded like the teacher in Charlie Brown, or somehow managed to touch on empowerment of students, open content and reuse as a moral imperative, communities (both in content and open source).
Some of the points that I was surprised to hear myself talking about were:
“flavours” of interaction imposed by various tools
although tools are relatively unimportant, the philosophies embodied within them subtly (and not so subtly) alters the nature of discourse
we need to honour and value the contributions of all participants - students add value to the conversation, so why should we lock their contributions behind a walled garden? Raving about John Willinsky’s “go public!” throwaway comment from Northern Voice 2007.
baby stepping from closed content, through walled gardens, and into the open. important to evangelize the importance of Going Public.
LOTS of great alternatives for tools (wordpress, openocw, drupal, etc…) - it’s more important to choose to be open, connected and social, than to worry about which tool(s) you use.
individual ownership of blogs is essential to meaningful conversations. Community/communal blog services lack individual “voice” in blogs - as opposed to more individual-focussed services like WordPress µ
likely a bunch of other stuff that’s blurry at the moment. hope it wasn’t blurry for the attendees…
During the presentation, Jim and I went off on some tangents that weren’t in the original plan. It felt like the tangents were much more important and interesting than the simple tech demo that was originally planned. I hope that’s what the attendees got. It was a bit strange for me - my thinking on the topic of Open Education and open content was shifting while I was talking. As I was speaking about this stuff, I could feel the thoughts coming together in my head. Thanks for the venue to cause that to happen!
After the presentation, I had the chance to talk with someone from Turkey (sorry! I’ve forgotten your name!) about the WordPress.com blockade in Turkey. I suggested she get in touch with Matt to see if there’s anything they can do together to move the blogs within Turkey’s borders so they can keep their communities going.
I also talked with Fred Mednick from Teachers without Borders. He’s looking for some help setting up some projects in Drupal - some pretty cool stuff that should help Make a Difference. If anyone can help Fred with some Drupal configuration and pimping-out, please let me/him know.
Here’s the presentation, with the clips and selections Brian and I used during the welcoming reception for the Canadian eLearning 2007 conference on Tuesday. I wound up not recording audio during the presentation, so you’ll just have to imagine witty and entertaining banter and intros for each video. Brian was responsible for both the witty and entertaining portions of the presentation.
The video selections came to 48 minutes. We were given a 45 minute slot after the welcome reception supper meal. You do the math…
Here’s the playlist Brian and I used for our presentation during the Canadian eLearning 2007 conference welcome reception on Tuesday evening. I’ll try to compress a version of the presentation with our clip selections (we only showed short clips from many of the videos) but I won’t get a chance to do that until the weekend.
intro
who the hell are we, and what the hell are we doing there?
Brief riff on new abundance of online video and DIY creativity in era of YouTube
I learned long ago, that when given the opportunity to do anything with Brian, I should jump on it. Doesn’t matter where, or what. Just do it. It’ll be interesting, or at least fun. Most likely, it’ll be both, in spades.
I was handed the chance to do something fun with Brian as part of the welcome reception for the Canadian eLearning 2007 Conference in Edmonton next week. It’s something new for the conference - entertainment as part of the welcome reception. What to do? People will be eating/drinking/talking, so a full-on presentation wouldn’t go over very well. What to do… What to do…
How about an Online Video Party?
So, we’ve picked a selection of videos, and will be queuing them up with some intro and discussion blabbidyblah. But mostly, we’ll watch some cool videos, and try to see how many people get freaked out by the trippy safe trippin’ test video. The first 3 rows will get wet.
I’ll have our video selections playing in a nice Keynote presentation, and will convert that to a web-friendly version after the event. I’ll also try to record audio during the session, in case anything interesting happens.
I gave a presentation this morning as part of Faculty Technology Days 2007. I was asked a few weeks ago if I'd like to talk about weblogs and wikis, and I couldn't come up a reason why not, so they slotted me in. In the meantime, I've been doing a lot of thinking about weblogs, wikis, academic publishing, and being Open, Connected and Social. So I decided to try to subvert my presentation slightly, into a more open-content-is-good kind of talk (but still based on blogs and wikis for much of it). What better way to do that, than to present directly from a wiki? It's worked very well for Brian Lamb - all of his presentations are wiki-driven.
Yesterday, I came across a link to some Firefox Greasemonkey scripts for use with Mediawiki. (aside: I'd thought I'd seen the link via Twitter, but can't seem to find who said it there - I remembered it being from Scott Leslie, but it could have been through del.icio.us, or via a comment he made on a blog somewhere…)
Anyway, on scanning through the list, one jumped out at me. Not literally, but that would have been cool. The "Wikipedia Presentation" script sounded very cool. I'm a big fan of the wiki-as-presentation style, and this mashed up a Mediawiki page with the awesome S5 html presentation engine. By installing this script, it automatically enables viewing any Mediawiki page as a full-screen slideware presentation.
So, I installed it.
And it failed. The current version of the script has been updated for the current version of Mediawiki. I'm using an older version (because my server doesn't have the latest PHP bits to run the latest MediaWiki). Older Mediawiki pages use div elements to mark sections of a page, while newer versions use spans. After some extremely complicated editing of the Greasemonkey script (changing the 3 instances of "span" to say "div" instead) I was off and running. My modified (i.e., reverted) version of the Greasemonkey script is available here.
The cool thing, if you're using a Mac (and, really, what ISN'T cooler if you're using a Mac) is that you can install an application called Mira to enable using the Apple Remote to control Firefox. I bound the back/forward buttons on the remote to the left/right arrow keys, and I was navigating through a Mediawiki page as a full-screen presentation, using a wireless remote.
There was one minor tweak I needed to make. By default, the content of the slide starts too far down the screen. When using a projector, you may be stuck at 800×600, and a bunch of that was sucked up by empty space at the top. So, I overrode one of the styles to make it start higher up. There are a couple of ways you can do this. If you have the Web Developer extension installed, just add a new User Style Sheet containing the style below. Otherwise, edit your Mediawiki skin (in my case, the file at /skins/monobook/main.css ) to add this:
I was asked a while back if I was interested in giving a presentation to the MacLearningEnvironments.org group. At first, my reaction was “sure, but what on earth would I talk about?” After some thought, an initial plan was to do an updated version of the Small Pieces Loosely Joined presentation I had the pleasure of doing way back in 2004 (with Brian and Alan). What would that have looked like if it was done in 2007? How would the changes in those long 3 years have affected things?
After hanging out with Jim at Northern Voice, it was obvious that the “3 amigos” (as someone else has called us, but the name somehow stuck) is now the “4 amigos” (and hopefully more). Jim is a kindred spirit, and so I had to include him in the mix. I’d also wanted to bring in Gardo (a 5th amigo?) but alas his schedule is already full on the day of the presentation.
Long story short, the 4 of us will be attempting another “jazz ensemble” presentation/panel, as an online session initiated by MacLearningEnvironments.org (but open to everyone).
From the session blurb:
In 2004 three of us presented a concept of decentralized connecting web content with RSS — “Small Technologies Loosely Joined” (http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/smallpieces), playing off of the book title by David Weinberger. Looking back at what we might call “Web 1.5″, using RSS to interconnect blogs, wikis, and chat seem rather simple. At that time, flickr and del.icio.us were still truly unknown betas, Google was just a search engine, folksonomy might not even had been coined as a term, podcasting did not exist, online videos were relegated to basic downloading to view– what a long way the web has come since then. However, underneath the shiny hood of the new tools, RSS remains a key integration factor Now we sit in 2007 with an explosion and continued expansion, of “small tools” leaving many educators overwhelmed and excited at the same time.
In this session, like a loose jazz quartet, four presenters will “jam” on the potential for teaching and learning as well as the state of web technology in four general areas
* bliki : can we genetically recombine blogs and wikis?
* mashups - bending the internet to do your bidding
* connecting people and information - RSS, Pipes, aggregators…
* insanely social software - putting the “we” in “web 2.0″
And more broadly look at the influence of open-content, connectedness, and social networking aspects.
So, if you feel like jamming with the band, book some time in your calendar on Wednesday, April 25, 11:00am Mountain (10:00am Pacific, 1:00pm Eastern, etc…) and tune in. It’s going to be as free-form as we can get away with, so please feel free/encouraged to join in. It’s happening as an Elluminate meeting, so we can share the microphone and screens etc… to keep things pretty dynamic in order to respond to questions and contributions on the fly.
Really, though, I was just looking for an excuse to bash some ideas around with Brian, Alan and Jim again. We’ve got some (hopefully) cool and useful stuff planned, and I’m hoping it takes on a life outside of the presentation.
Update: of course, I didn’t mean to leave anyone out of the “amigos” - Scott is definitely in there, as is Stephen. And a bunch of others. Not meaning to sound like a boorish elitist…�
It should be a blast. I’ve been following Chris and Jon’s (and of course Brian’s) blogs for a long time now (I’m sorry Sylvia - I don’t think I’ve seen your blog yet, although I’ve seen your tracks on many of the blogs I read). I’m not completely sure what I’ll talk about for my portion of the panel presentation, but I’ll likely share some experiences from weblogs.ucalgary.ca, our incredible success with the student teacher blogging/journal program, and the shared social software hosting environment I’m working on with BCIT for BCCampus.
Hopefully the session is spent mostly on discussion, rather than presentation. I’m sure we’ll all have a lot to talk about.
We’re also working on a cool session for Moose Camp (with Scott Leslie at the helm of that one) on mashups for non-geeks. That should be fun, too. (and I’ve still got a lot of homework to do before that session…)
Northern Voice (and Moose Camp, and anything else we can scrape together) should be another incredible experience this year. To top it off Cole is coming up from Penn State (maybe we’ll get to do an ETS Talk Podcast from Vancouver?), and Chris is flying in from the UK.
Good thing I’ve got a nice, long vacation planned shortly after I return from NV!
Patti and I are putting a wiki page together to support our ePortfolio session at Interface 2006 in Lethbridge this Thursday. The session is nominally about the ePortfolio pilot project we’re doing with our Faculty of Education, but I’m hoping we’ll get to have a discussion about ePortfolios (HATE that “e”) in general.
I just added some “What is a ePortfolio?” content, and it feels like it could turn into a thesis pretty darned quickly. Not sure I want to go down that road, though…
The wiki page is really rough at the moment, and woefully incomplete, but we’ll be polishing it up over the next day or so.
We were able to record that Intro to Podcasting presentation I gave on Wednesday, and the video has been processed and compressed. The audio is a bit wonky because the microphones were fixed and all turned on - and I wasn’t wearing a lapel mic so I get hard to hear as I wander around the front of the room. Next time, I’ll wear a lapel mic, and warn everyone that all of the microphones are on all the time to avoid the paper rustling and desk drumming that got picked up.
Thanks to King for working his video compression ninja skillz on the rough VHS source. He pumped out a small (iPod) and larger (computer playable) version.
I’m sitting in the airport in Vancouver (and later on the plane coming home) and wanted to capture some of the thoughts I have about how the keynote went. I’m absolutely exhausted, so I’m not sure how coherent this is going to be, but it’s important to get this down before it’s glossed over and starts to fade away.
Some context - this was my first keynote as presenter (well, co-presenter), so I was a bit intimidated by that. I’ve been part of (and have given) presentations to very large groups, but never as Keynote Presenterâ„¢. Our ideas about what the keynote should be about all revolved around topics involving individual autonomy and control of content and learning, of ownership, and of thinking critically about the nature of relationships between students and teachers, as well as with institutions. Education vs. learning. Individual vs. institutional. Some potentially radical and non-traditional keynote topics, which would be completely unsuited to a conventional powerpoint chalk-and-talk presentation.
We had been joking about going into the keynote unprepared - I think mostly to mask nervousness about taking such a big risk with a “keynote” session. The three of us have been tossing around ideas and spit-balling what we’d like to do in the session for a couple of weeks - hoping to generate a level of discomfort and disorientation in the attendees - that this session belongs to them, not us. That learning belongs to the individual, not the institution. That they are in control of what they do, as are their students.
It was easily the scariest and highest “risk” sessions I’ve ever been involved in. We all knew going in that there was a real chance of some pretty dramatic “failure” if the people in the audience didn’t engage.
The first 20 minutes of the session were sheer torture (ironically, amplified by the fact that the microphones Just Didn’t Workâ„¢). We started by coming off the stage to emphasize that the session wasn’t “ours”. We all had wireless microphones, and were trying to wander, to solicit some form of involvement. We set up a web-based chat room to serve as a back channel, and left that on the Big Screen to help direct the session (I’ll come back to that later).
At first, every single attendee looked freaked out, uncomfortable, and wondering what the hell was going on. Why wasn’t there a powerpoint on the screen? Why are these jokers just wandering around? What’s going on? This is the lamest thing I’ve ever seen! What are they DOING? What a waste of time…
After the initial uncomfortableness wore off a little, people started to get into it. Certainly not everyone. The feeling of discomfort in the room was pretty tangible. I wound up subconsciously moving back closer to the stage to provide a semblance of a traditional keynote, I suppose trying to put people a bit at ease. Or, it might have been to put myself at ease.
This was by far the riskiest thing I’ve ever done professionally. I parachuted into Vancouver, and attempted to lead/herd 500(?) strangers into some form of guided anarchy. I was so far outside of my comfort zone it wasn’t even funny, fighting the urge to just bolt from the room. What the hell were we thinking?
And then it felt like it started to gel, at least for a portion of the audience. Some extremely interesting points were raised, and answered by responses from other attendees. We shifted to more of a Phil Donohue role, running with the microphones to people who wanted to speak up. Not everyone got engaged, but enough to drive the conversation forward.
For the last quarter of the session, we started to get some momentum. Questions and responses started to pile up, and I stopped hogging the microphone as much. If we’d had an extra 15 minutes, I think most people would have reached a level of comfort with what was going on so they would have gotten more out of the session. It didn’t hurt that everyone stayed seated for the iPod door prize draws.
The web chat back channel served an invaluable purpose. People were able to anonymously put “huh?”, or “what are they TALKING about?”, or “talk about GLU!” comments (etc…) up on the big screen, helping to guide the session. I think that open back channel helped to save the session, as it helped us get a better feel for what the Audience was going through. I’ll be keeping an archive of that chat transcript available to serve as reference later.
One thing I realized is that it is extremely hard to read an audience that size. A small group is easy to read. You can make eye contact. You can hear comments, rustling, shifting. You can see attention diverting. But in a room with several hundred people, it is hard to get a feel for what is going on. Even when someone was talking, it was quite hard to spot them in the sea of attendees.
So, what are the lessons learned from this?
Open, anonymous back channels are insanely important to helping to keep a finger on the pulse of a Large Audience. The anonymity is important because people don’t have to worry about offending by saying something’s gone off the tracks, or is boring, or just by suggesting a topic without having to be put on the spot with a microphone shoved in their face. Having a working wireless network, and an audience with capable laptops, definitely helped here. But not everyone had a laptop. This works out something like “clickers” on steroids, and could be a useful strategy for other presentations, or in the classroom in general.
The audience was too large for this kind of activity. Even half the size would have been better. This was approximately the same activity we’d run at both the Social Software Salon and Edublogger Hootenanny, but those events had participant counts around 12-ish and 50-ish, respectively. I hold those previous events as the best sessions I’ve ever been involved with, and am extremely proud of what we were able to do. That chemistry just didn’t happen during this keynote. Perhaps the audience-is-the-presentation model doesn’t scale to 300-500 people? More thought needed on this…
Defining a narrower topic or series of topics is important. We’d set up the wiki page, but failed to fall back on it when the audience wasn’t engaging - we were perhaps overcommitted to drawing the audience out? Back to the Salon and Hootenanny - both had (comparatively) narrow topics well defined ahead of time. We’d tried to do that with the wiki page, but didn’t successfully fall back on it when things didn’t move forward fast enough.
In the final conclusion, I felt the session was both a success and a failure. I personally rated it at 5/10. Stephen gave it a 6/10. That’s not great. I’m not used to that. But, I think that it’s actually a good thing. I’d been staying inside my comfort zone way too long. It’s crucial to stretch out and try new things. Failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Worst case scenario, we modeled some risk-taking behaviour for the attendees, and survived the experience. Best case scenario, some of the attendees will have walked away with the seeds of some important new ideas waiting to germinate sometime in the future. No way to track that, though.
Am I going to be a little gun-shy about doing a session like this again? Probably. I’ll have to put some thought into how to ensure the session remains useful and interesting for everyone. It’s not acceptable to just push forward, knowing that half the audience is not with you (or, you’re not with them).
After the session, we schlepped our exhausted carcasses across the street to a hole-in-the-wall pub for debriefing. The discussion that Stephen, Brian and myself had there over a few brews was worth the trip and the risk all by itself. I’ve been needing that discussion for a long time, and am feeling a renewed sense of energy that I hope will last for a while. I think I will benefit a lot from learning about Stephen’s walkabout, as well as Brian’s thoughts and feedback. Thanks for that. You are both true friends, in every sense.
Update: Added podcast link to the audio recorded by Stephen.
I’m sitting in the hotel lobby with Brian and Stephen, putting some thought into wtf we’re going to try during our keynote. One idea Stephen had was to have an open web-based chat room, so attendees (physical or virtual) could ask questions, make comments, etc… without the intimidation of grabbing the microphone.
After a quick Google, and a few false starts, I found a link to Lace - it’s a simple PHP + “Ajax” chat server, using flat files to store session and chat data. That means it can run anywhere PHP can run, without needing a database.
I put a copy on one of our servers for us to use during the keynote. It looks like it will be much more open than an AIM group chat, and easier than an IRC channel.
We’ll also be mobile - the three of us with wireless microphones - and there will be 2 standing microphones in the room, so audience participation should be relatively easy. If the folks aren’t into it, we’ll fall back into a more conventional panel discussion, but we’re really hoping that the attendees take over the session.
Paul just sent me a link to a cool sounding (but unfinished) project called code4lib session snatcher. It sounds like it’s a pet project of a systems librarian who was working on some code on a flight to the code4lib conference. The code is intended to act as a presentation recorder for the S5 presentation system, recording both slide timings and audio, and (presumably) packaging both up for playback after the fact.
It’s currently Pretty Darned Hard to properly record a full-on presentation. Getting the audio is no biggie, but getting the timing of the presentation so it synchs up to the audio is decidedly non-trivial. The session snatcher author referenced Lawrence Lessig’s quest for a usable solution to do this. I’m not sure S5 would satisfy Lessig’s style, but this just might work…
Art took an interesting tack in recording an S5 presentation - it looks like he’s using a java client/server combination to act as both webserver (hosting the S5 presentation, and therefore recording times of requests) and recording the audio. That’s pretty cool. I couldn’t find a download to try it out (and couldn’t find more info about it on his blog), so I’m just dumping a reference to it here so I’ll eventually remember to come back and see how things have progressed.
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