In my ridiculous (and exasperating) fashion, I have two talks coming up, of course during the busiest time of the semester. Fortunately, I don't need to be in class to be in class (the audio from Thursday's class meeting--yes, they're having class without me-- will be posted to the blog, and I'll be interacting with students on their blogs, and who knows, perhaps on mine).

That I don't give the same talk twice has kept me up late for several nights reading, thinking, designing, creating, as I try to push my thinking. (Another habit I've got to do something about, I suppose, but really, if I'm not learning something each time I put a talk together, how can I expect my audience to discover anything?) This time I have pushed myself to get more creative and effective with my media as well as my message--and I walk the edge here trying out something new during a talk that means a good deal to me. Am I crazy? Perhaps. But I'm taking to heart what Yi-Fu Tuan writes in Space and Place: "Experience is the overcoming of perils...To experience in the active sense requires that one venture forth into the unfamiliar and experiment with the elusive and uncertain. To become an expert one must dare to confront the perils of the new." (p.9)

I don't really have anything against Powerpoint slides--PPT is a great tool in the right hands and in the right venue. It's just that anyone who gives keynotes knows that bad slides, even pretty good slides, can induce a Pavlovian response in the audience: slides-right,ok- zone out time. And so all along I have played around with other ways to share visuals: Flickr sets being my mainstay, with a dose of wikis and even the old bgblogging, Slide.com and iMOVIE for good measure. Sometimes I use no media at all --we just have a conversation. Lately, though, I've been inspired by some of my mentors in this work--Jim Groom, Brian Lamb, Nancy White, all of the TEDTalks, to name a few--to push beyond the notion of the slide altogether, to be more creative while going deeper. And so, for my upcoming talk at NITLE's Conference on Teaching Writing in the Digital Age, I have created a collage of links, images, videos, text, you name it, as a way to try to capture the tensions and the promise, the perils and the pleasures, of moving the teaching of writing into this new century. I think the collage-as-presentation makes a lot of sense for what I'm trying to show. We'll see how it goes, but I sure had a lot of fun (frustrating fun) putting it together with vuvox.com's new beta collage tool, a fabulous tool in its flexibility and its connectivity. Now we'll see how it works during a presentation--I designed it for people who wish to go back and spend some time in the collage, exploring the links and media, long after the conference itself has faded away. Ultimately I'd like to add an audio voiceover from my talk, to contextualize and create a narrative flow over the disparate pieces. And I'll be tinkering, adding more links, more video, more, well... see what you think...

Balancing Acts: The Collage

The one that excited me most, since I can see an immediate use, is using a wiki to make a resource available online. Michael Tinkler and I have been talking about collaborating on a book about the campus building.  The wiki seems like the perfect way to attack it.  I can start it with the information I currently have as a static webpage. I envision adding a timeline, and pictures of each building.  I could possibly have more than one picture, looking at different time periods.  Michael and his students could then add more information as is it discovered. I suspect it would be best to restrict revisions to those in Michael's classes, but we would need a way to get input from alums and the community.  I'm already thinking of other resources to handle this way.

My thanks to John Anderies and Robert Kieft of Furnam University for their presentation, "Creating the Digital Dictionary of Quaker Biography: The Wikification of a Hallowed Reference Source."

NITLE Sakai User Group Meeting. On Tuesday, I was invited by Martin Ramsey to give a brief presentation at the NITLE Sakai User Group Meeting. NITLE is a non-profit that helps liberal arts educators make use of emerging technologies. There were a number of Sakai users there, as well as institutions piloting Sakai as part of a shared pilot program that NITLE is running.

The meeting went all day and I only attended a small portion mid-way through, but two themes stood out for me. First, there was a concern about whether a school with a small (or non-existent!) IT staff could effectively run an enterprise installation of Sakai. The second was how institutions without development staff could contribute to the project. Both of these are important considerations and I was especially happy to see this group thinking about how to give back to the community.

For the first question, it is important to distinguish between the initial deployment and ongoing operation. While there is more to say about the initial deployment, setting up any enterprise system is going to require some specialized skills that may not be abundant at small schools. There's nothing really unique to Sakai. Getting the system integrated with a student information system, setting up the hosting infrastructure, and rolling out training to users are all task that come with rolling out a new CMS. This is also where commercial partners come in. They can provide installation and support of Sakai for those who can't, or don't want to, by themselves.

As for contributing to the community, there are many ways smaller organizations can contribute short of writing Code. A few that were discussed in the meeting include:Helping with Quality Assurance. This work is fairly easy to distribute and you don't need programming skills to be involved.

1. Helping with Quality Assurance. This work is fairly easy to distribute and you don't need programming skills to be involved.
2. Assisting with Documentation. It's best not to be a developer if you're writing end-user documentation. We can always have more and the existing documentation can always be better. Since larger institutions do a fair amount of customization, often requiring custom documentation, this is a place where the smaller schools who are going to be using the "out of the box" Sakai can really make a big contribution.
3. Working in the requirements development. Helping the community collect, prioritize and document requirements is another place where programming skills aren't needed. To be certain you do need to understand the application and technology fairly well.
4. Banding together. There were probably a dozen institutions represented at the meeting. Pooling resources could allow these institutions to get development work completed. It's more complicated, of course, but it isn't out of the question if the community has common interests that aren't being otherwise addressed.

Zimbra and Sakai. Zimbra, the open source email and calendar software provider recently acquired by Yahoo!, is getting a lot of attention. Anthony and I met with Viral Kadakia, Director of Product Management, and other interested members of the Sakai community (including Unicon, who has become a Zimbra VAR). While there is nothing concrete to announce at this time, we can expect to see at least a lightweight integration between Sakai and Zimbra in the coming year, probably by allowing the synoptic calendar in "My Workspace" to display both Sakai and Zimbra events. There's lots more that can be done here, of course, and we should embrace this type of effort. I know Sakai isn't going to keep up with Zimbra in terms of calendaring capabilities, for example. Finding a way for Sakai to easily use another open-source (or proprietary) solution to manage those types of things that are provided by other enterprise applications on campus is a "good thing."

It also underscores to the importance of standards (you don't want to do this in 10 different ways). We also talked about JSR 170, the Java Content Repository specification. It was only a speculative conversation at this point, but I think making content available across enterprise applications is an important long term direction.

Serensoft and Blackbaud. I had dinner with Chip Stiles from Serensoft and a couple of his contacts at Blackbaud, who are most well known for their "Raiser's Edge" fund-raising management software. They also have a student information system (Education Edge) that has been successful both in K-12 and in smaller higher education institutions. They had lots of questions about Sakai and Open Source in general and we talked about how things get done. It may seem impossible, given the relative lack of central control (not the same as lack of coordination) but, at the end of the day, we have software that many schools are running in production. In any case, I hope to see Blackbaud at the Newport Beach conference so they can learn more about working with our community.

Wimba and Elluminate. On Tuesday night I attended the Wimba reception at the Space Needle. I was somewhat disappointed that the reception was on the 2nd floor rather than at the top, but that was quickly forgotten with the fine hospitality of the Wimba crew. Hats off to the organizers for a very nice event. Back on the conference floor I got to see the Wimba tools working inside Sakai, which was great. I also stopped by the Elluminate booth and, although they didn't have a Sakai integration to show me at the time, I have it on good authority that they will be demonstrating their integration at the Newport Beach Conference. As I've written before, these integrations are important because they allow Sakai users to get more out of the solution.

That's all for now...I'll try to get another entry up by the end of the week with a focus on Sakai member institutions.

RFID--placing physical tags could mean tagging, cataloging environments [we've been talking about this quite a bit at UR but only for surveillance, inventory measures, circulation in the library.]

why are we [as a nationa] behind in mobile devices (behind europe, etc.) size, network size--very complex. Japan, mobile devices as an answer to less laptops (we have more machines in US). Momentum problems--in UK it was cheaper to text than to call. Africa had bad land lines, cheaper and easier with cell phones.

wimax, standard for wifi, longer range for miles, leaves are a problem, so we may not see this work locally.

Mobile devices as media capture tools--americans do not know how or what to do with it. during london underground bombings, UK citizens photo'd and sent images directly to BBC. CNN doesn't have that counterpart that works easily.

John schott--media prof. at carleton with mobile classroom

Mobile technologies to generate interviews, quick information--pick up your class and go with GIPSY project, amsterdam

students in academia have access to the world, but K-12 are increasingly filtered on their content. parents fear the internet.

privacy as a concept that isn't there anymore, we need to learn from our students who already live in a world with breakdowns of privacy (drunken pics from tijuana.)

swarming--military strategies change, armies with mobile devices do not need to follow one another, people can disperse and swarm. WTO protestors in Seattle would fan out and identify where the police were not, they led the police around their city.

Yellow arrow project, hyperlinking the world. in DC and New York.

For libraries, gaming (topics of games?) as a means for information literacy

Web 2.0, microcontent, rather than sites or documents-gliffy (drawing tool)

microcontent, multiple authored

open content--but how open? open microcontent

[an observation, i'm already zoning out, sadly. I don't think i function well in a classroom context anymore either. i'm always talking about how students don't, i'm going the same way.]

mashups can only happen thru open content

idea of perpetual beta, web 2.0 is fluid, flexible

ajax based products, lighter without caching, but content behind it is not open

Book: Dreaming in Code

web 2.0 makes entering information easier than 1.0--no need of coding.

web 2.0 storytelling, catch up on long girl story. flickr groups that tell stories in 5 frames.

jilltxt.net--explores gender and gaming

games can be used to make other things, game content is video content. use maneuvers to make video. machinima.com

audacity, open source for sound recording

podcasting, need a place to put them, to live. ourmedia.com

"profcasting" by faculty--difficult lectures recorded to go back to. or record out of class to polish material or deal with hard-to-follow material.

Garage band to add images to audio.

Transom.com (audio media) disquiet.com, ambient music

Odeo

Podzinger

Yeah, this is a crappy entry. It's all for my own reference. Or maybe yours.