education building

Darren reminds me of an event coming to SFU Vancouver, put on by the The Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing. (New web site launched here).  The Center hosts a series of workshops each summer on a broad range of topics.  There are 30 this year covering books, magazines, editing, design + production, and new media.

The SFU Summer Publishing Workshops offer you a chance to learn from and work with more than 100 of Canada’s top editors, writers, marketers, designers, publishers, and new media moguls.

The New Media workshop which Darren will be speaking at (as well as several other local media moguls including; Kris, Robert, Susie, Travis, Will,)  promises to be a stellar experience.  I met most of these folks last year at blogsndogs, and if that was any indication, you can expect no less that the most cutting edge internet technologies to be served up on a hot bed of best practices, tips, and clear explanations.  Not to mention loads of fun!

Alot of credit is due to Monique Trottier from somisguided.com for helping get this event together.  She also writes a brilliant blog herself.

Given the amount of videos I have been watching online lately, I couldnt resist following up on this, and sharing some of my recent favs.

Starting with the icing, Abject Learning highlighted a post today from Gardner Writes that makes this relevant to education. My own take is going to be a bit more off topic educationally speaking. Brian then follows to make my week with a link to one of the coolest home produced vids I’ve seen. Just amazing, particularly if you have done that drive.

This took me back a couple weeks to a gem from geek entertainment tv interviewing Tom Green. They discussed his recently launched vlogging, ‘deputy’ community, and promoted vloggercon. The interview is hilarious for one thing, and green does a classic commentary on “old media”, that kills. Essentially the point from both the interview”er” and “ee”, was, “look out TV and Hollywood, the internet is ours”.

Proving the point on a larger scale this post via Screenhead, the first “open movie”, Elephants Dream,

“…made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license.”

Their process is available on wikipedia, and serves as a model for collaboration between open source software and filmmakers, and who knows, maybe an entirely new industry just for good measure.

Lastly, these two virals that speak out humorously against the history of oil, and conspiratorially question the events of 9/11. This new media thing certainly has the potential to stir things up. I’m curious if that will be the case on campus and in the classroom.

Oh, and not to leave things on a somber note, you have to see Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros

yay screenhead!

Thanks to Clarence Fisher of Remote Access for leading me to a new open media resource, The Webcast Academy. Two actually. Teachers Teaching Teachers produces their webcasts at the Academy on the topics of…

Skyping, Webcasting, and Podcasting By and For Teachers

They leverage the academies’ rich portal which serves as a both a forum for the media, and at the same time as an indepth training resource for anyone interested in doing webcasts. It even has an apprenticeship program which I’ll have to take a closer look at.

Overview
The goals of the Webcast Academy include

• increasing the number of people who are capable of producing live, interactive webcasts
• applying the open source community approach to skill development
• creating a place that formally recognizes proficiency, excellence, and innovation in these new media skills

This looks to be a really amazing and open resource for teachers, learners and the general public alike to learn about and experience webcasting. I’d be very interested in hearing any experiences people have had with the Academy.

Of course these days there are always more than one way to skin a, err… to produce fine, useful media and distribute it to your audience. Doug has done nice video on Getting Started with Blogger, using the amazing YouTube as a publishing mechanism, which by all accounts is currently the leading video tool of choice.

Thanks to Barbara for sending me this link. One of the activities here in the LIDC is staying on top of the many conferences, seminars and workshops going on around the elearning community, and this one seemed to stir some interest.

A Cambridge Symposium 22-23 June 2006

Who should attend
The Symposium will be of interest to academics, learning technologists, developers, administrators, e-learning coordinators and managers, researchers, staff developers, IT champions, change agents and all those in tertiary education who wish to find out more about collaborative e-learning and how to support and sustain sharing communities of practice. Contribution to the discussions will be actively encouraged.

Themes
Sustaining communities

• Reward & recognition: staff development and support
• Interdisciplinary issues: crossing boundaries
• Rights & responsibilities: ownership and sharing
• Community building: sustainable strategies
• The student voice: learner centric approaches

Supporting processes

• Quality assurance: evaluation, peer-review
• Repositories & content management systems
• Frameworks, templates, methodologies
• Sustainability: towards a permanent home
• Setting up large-scale projects: lessons and successes

We track many of the conferences we attend via a nifty little add on that is integrated into the ESI wiki. You can read all we are up to here. When time permits we also try to write a short synopsis of the event. My most recent conference was CHI in montreal, read my notes here. link

I intended this to be a 5 min. presentation, but it ballooned to just over 11. I’ll likely be going to back to edit it down, and/or ’shoot’ it over to make i a bit more concise. I’m told these should actually be about 2- 3 minutes, because of users low attention spans, so I might even do it in smaller chunks.

Another caveat, this was my first attempt at using Camtasia, so I dont think I have figured out the best way to optimize/present this file. For now, you will have to stream it off a webpage using the Flash format, as it was the smallest file I could generate.

http://www.sfu.ca/~jtoal/presentations/g_reader/googlereader.html

I am gathering some google related resources with follow up links on this presentation on a wiki page. This is just getting started, but I intend to keep building this up and punctuate interesting tools with screencasts. Then, on to Yahoo!, Microsoft and a bunch of the other “big players” in the software business. You can tell they are watching the open source/social software movement closley, but we’ll see if their implentatons ring as true as many of the tools we present in Social Learning.