K12 Online – More than cool tools

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:

  1. embed
  2. connect
  3. socialize
  4. collaborate
  5. share
  6. remix
  7. filter
  8. liberate
  9. 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…

Open, Connected, Social – the movie!

I had the pleasure of co-presenting a session with Brian, Alan and Jim for the MacLearningEnvironments.org group. We wound up breathing some new life into Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and building some demo sites and background wiki pages. Here's the video for the session:

Open, Connected & Social

The video is available in iPod format, and original lossless QuickTime format. Brian is also offering up an audio-only MP3 version of the jam session.

I had the pleasure of co-presenting a session with Brian, Alan and Jim for the MacLearningEnvironments.org group. We wound up breathing some new life into Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and building some demo sites and background wiki pages. Here’s the video for the session:

Open, Connected & Social

The video is available in iPod format, and original lossless QuickTime format. Brian is also offering up an audio-only MP3 version of the jam session.

Upcoming presentation – (Many, Too Many?) Small Technologies Loosely Joined: Open, Connected, and Social

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…�

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…�

ETUG Social Software Workshop Debriefing

Our session this morning went really well. I think we were able to walk the line between force-feeding the participants with the relentless firehose of super-cool social software stuff, and having a fun interactive session that served as a solid starting point for people wanting to play with Web 2.0™ toys.

The session was completely full, with Harry quietly jamming to the groovy vibes of Sesame Street. It was pretty cool having Harry in the session, and he was good enough to let Keira participate.

I think that Brian and I got into a pretty decent flow, and wound up demonstrating some cool apps and concepts, with participants doing as much hands-on activity as possible (tagging, blogging, playing with Flickr and Flickrlilli, etc…) SocialLearning.ca was used as a concrete example of social software, a tagging and blogging platform, and as a "client" app for a 3rd party tool (receiving photos from Flickr).

It was a blast, as always, riding on Brian's coat tails. I've got to find a way to invite him to UCalgary, assuming Keira is forgiving enough to let Brian keep travelling…

Our session this morning went really well. I think we were able to walk the line between force-feeding the participants with the relentless firehose of super-cool social software stuff, and having a fun interactive session that served as a solid starting point for people wanting to play with Web 2.0™ toys.

The session was completely full, with Harry quietly jamming to the groovy vibes of Sesame Street. It was pretty cool having Harry in the session, and he was good enough to let Keira participate.

I think that Brian and I got into a pretty decent flow, and wound up demonstrating some cool apps and concepts, with participants doing as much hands-on activity as possible (tagging, blogging, playing with Flickr and Flickrlilli, etc…) SocialLearning.ca was used as a concrete example of social software, a tagging and blogging platform, and as a "client" app for a 3rd party tool (receiving photos from Flickr).

It was a blast, as always, riding on Brian's coat tails. I've got to find a way to invite him to UCalgary, assuming Keira is forgiving enough to let Brian keep travelling…

Ready for our Social Software workshop for BCCampus

Brian managed to swing me an invite to co-host his Social Software session at the BCCampus Spring Workshop on Educational Technologies 2006, which will be held at North Island College in beautiful downtown Courtenay BC. (actually, I’ve never been to Courtenay/Comox, so am looking forward to seeing the area – I’m flying in on a Beech 1900D, so that leg of the trip should be interesting).

The session should be fun. Brian and I are going to demo a few concepts of social software (Web 2.0 *gack*) and then turn the reigns over to the participants. We’ll be using SocialLearning.ca as the “hub” to bring together activities like tagging, bookmarking, blogging, and commenting. I really like the approach, especially with a concrete piece of the web bringing it together. It should make the freaky concepts of decentralized social aggregate tag clouds a bit easier to grok.

I spent some time this week pimping the SocialLearning.ca instance of Drupal – opening up the tag clouds, tweaking a few bits here and there, so it should work really nicely as a platform for a workshop – as well as supporting the BCCampus community afterwards.

The SocialLearning.ca tag cloud will be on centre stage for the workshop, so the participants can see how their contributions affect it (hopefully in quasi-realtime).

As always, I’m so totally looking forward to working with Brian (and his planted ringers). This should be a great workshop. I’m also really curious to see what the participants come up with…

Brian managed to swing me an invite to co-host his Social Software session at the BCCampus Spring Workshop on Educational Technologies 2006, which will be held at North Island College in beautiful downtown Courtenay BC. (actually, I’ve never been to Courtenay/Comox, so am looking forward to seeing the area – I’m flying in on a Beech 1900D, so that leg of the trip should be interesting).

The session should be fun. Brian and I are going to demo a few concepts of social software (Web 2.0 *gack*) and then turn the reigns over to the participants. We’ll be using SocialLearning.ca as the “hub” to bring together activities like tagging, bookmarking, blogging, and commenting. I really like the approach, especially with a concrete piece of the web bringing it together. It should make the freaky concepts of decentralized social aggregate tag clouds a bit easier to grok.

I spent some time this week pimping the SocialLearning.ca instance of Drupal – opening up the tag clouds, tweaking a few bits here and there, so it should work really nicely as a platform for a workshop – as well as supporting the BCCampus community afterwards.

The SocialLearning.ca tag cloud will be on centre stage for the workshop, so the participants can see how their contributions affect it (hopefully in quasi-realtime).

As always, I’m so totally looking forward to working with Brian (and his planted ringers). This should be a great workshop. I’m also really curious to see what the participants come up with…

Fun in Vancouver – Day 1

Had a good flight over the Rocks this am. Too damned early, but them’s the breaks. Took a psycho cab ride from YVR to UBC – cabbie using GPS mapping to find the centre of campus. Went for a quick walk to the lookout point over the rose garden (holy crap is UBC a gorgeous campus…) then headed up to Buchanan C Penthouse to meet up with Brian and Alan for the morning Pachyderm demo session.

The Pachy session went reasonably well – a quick overview of the software, and some demos of some published content (Mavericks, MSoMA, Education ePortfolio prototype, etc…). Some really good questions from the ~12 people in the audience.

Then a quick walk back to the rose garden, and on to the Studio for the Social Software Salon. Brian and Jason recorded the whole session, which turned into essentially a freefrom roundtable discussion of social software as it relates to education, and vice versa. Gardner Campbell Skyped in, and the whole conversation was really interesting. Jason and Brian will be releasing nuggets of the 3-hour recording as smaller podcasts. Hope that turned out OK.

Hanging out at Casa Del Lamb – great food, great conversation, and Brian makes one mean Manhattan.

I’ll be posting what few pics I took – Alan has his XT here, so I’m feeling like I can chill out and let his Big Gun take care of the photo-documentary…

Had a good flight over the Rocks this am. Too damned early, but them’s the breaks. Took a psycho cab ride from YVR to UBC – cabbie using GPS mapping to find the centre of campus. Went for a quick walk to the lookout point over the rose garden (holy crap is UBC a gorgeous campus…) then headed up to Buchanan C Penthouse to meet up with Brian and Alan for the morning Pachyderm demo session.

The Pachy session went reasonably well – a quick overview of the software, and some demos of some published content (Mavericks, MSoMA, Education ePortfolio prototype, etc…). Some really good questions from the ~12 people in the audience.

Then a quick walk back to the rose garden, and on to the Studio for the Social Software Salon. Brian and Jason recorded the whole session, which turned into essentially a freefrom roundtable discussion of social software as it relates to education, and vice versa. Gardner Campbell Skyped in, and the whole conversation was really interesting. Jason and Brian will be releasing nuggets of the 3-hour recording as smaller podcasts. Hope that turned out OK.

Hanging out at Casa Del Lamb – great food, great conversation, and Brian makes one mean Manhattan.

I’ll be posting what few pics I took – Alan has his XT here, so I’m feeling like I can chill out and let his Big Gun take care of the photo-documentary…

Heading to Northern Voice 2006

northern voice moosebuttI just bought my registration to Northern Voice 2006 – for the full 2-day extravaganza including Moose Camp. I’m SOOOO looking forward to this. I’ll be taking time off to do it, and traveling on my own dime, but it’s going to be awesome. This year’s conference was one of the high points of a decidedly hectic and memorable year.

And, to make it even better, Alan and Brian will be there too, marking the first Three Amigos reunion since NMC 2004! The Three Amigos ride again, but this time on a big ol’ Canadian moose!

I’m looking forward to this more than a WWDC or even NMC2005 (which was in Hawaii for crying out loud)!

Now to try to figure out how to convince Janice that airfare is actually an investment, not a luxury 🙂

northern voice moosebuttI just bought my registration to Northern Voice 2006 – for the full 2-day extravaganza including Moose Camp. I’m SOOOO looking forward to this. I’ll be taking time off to do it, and traveling on my own dime, but it’s going to be awesome. This year’s conference was one of the high points of a decidedly hectic and memorable year.

And, to make it even better, Alan and Brian will be there too, marking the first Three Amigos reunion since NMC 2004! The Three Amigos ride again, but this time on a big ol’ Canadian moose!

I’m looking forward to this more than a WWDC or even NMC2005 (which was in Hawaii for crying out loud)!

Now to try to figure out how to convince Janice that airfare is actually an investment, not a luxury 🙂

The CogDogBlog is Muzzled (temporarily)

Just got an email from Alan Levine asking me to light the beacons to send word throughout the Kingdom of Man that his XServe has succumbed to the unblinking gaze of Sauron himself. As a last ditch effort to salt the earth lest Evil gets a foothold, the server promptly decided to rename/delete some rather critical files. Needless to say, it’s now a smouldering pile of shiny brushed aluminum (until probably Monday, when a fresh hard drive module will be slapped in and life-giving charges of electricity once again flow through its temperamental silicon heart).

So, if you’re wondering what happened to Alan – he’s fine. The Demo Gods just decided to flick a little humility his way, since he was planning to demo something on that server while he’s in New York City (New York City!) on Friday.

If you’re someone borrowing his freely offered Feed2JS service – you’ll have to cool your jets until the weekend at the earliest, as Alan attempts to perform a resurrection from a distance. Or, you could have hosted it yourself instead of freeloading on Alan’s good will… 🙂

Personally, I think this is just the first wave Leroy Swivelhips‘ first offensive – an edublogger blitzkrieg that shall leave no field unburned. There is an odd similarity in his appearance and writing to another wormtongued messenger

Just got an email from Alan Levine asking me to light the beacons to send word throughout the Kingdom of Man that his XServe has succumbed to the unblinking gaze of Sauron himself. As a last ditch effort to salt the earth lest Evil gets a foothold, the server promptly decided to rename/delete some rather critical files. Needless to say, it’s now a smouldering pile of shiny brushed aluminum (until probably Monday, when a fresh hard drive module will be slapped in and life-giving charges of electricity once again flow through its temperamental silicon heart).

So, if you’re wondering what happened to Alan – he’s fine. The Demo Gods just decided to flick a little humility his way, since he was planning to demo something on that server while he’s in New York City (New York City!) on Friday.

If you’re someone borrowing his freely offered Feed2JS service – you’ll have to cool your jets until the weekend at the earliest, as Alan attempts to perform a resurrection from a distance. Or, you could have hosted it yourself instead of freeloading on Alan’s good will… 🙂

Personally, I think this is just the first wave Leroy Swivelhips‘ first offensive – an edublogger blitzkrieg that shall leave no field unburned. There is an odd similarity in his appearance and writing to another wormtongued messenger