Again, I'm liveblogging. What follows are summaries of rapid-fire, 5-minute-long presentations on projects. Reflection to follow.
Note: The featured bloggers have a giant podium blocking the screen, so these are going to be harder to evaluate/comment on.
Browyn Stuckey, Building a Community Out of Online Professional Development
Quest Atlantis. Mashup for Quest Atlantis Teacher Community. It's a virtual world environment with a game structure for curriculum delivery. Built on the ActiveWorlds platform. It's now approaching 600 quests and 100 different missions that children accomplish as part of the game structure. (Note: I'm not a gamer, so I'm not sure what that means. . .) A socially responsible game: emphasizes learning, playing, and helping. Involves face-to-face and online teacher training and professional development. Emphasizes ideas of embodied cognition. Teacher professional development occurs both through facilitated sessions and through missions in the virtual world. A mashup of events, activities, and sources across many platforms to meet teachers where they already live online--e.g. Facebook, Slideshare, YouTube.
Jackie Gerstein, Creative Web Tools For and By Kids
Creative Web Tools wikis. Students take on the role of stewardship of their own experiences. Students created animated introductions with their own voices to preview their own projects. Students pick their topics and get a wiki page. They use Doppel Me, Moblyng slide shows, Wordle. Students set their own learning goals, evaluate the tools' utility for other students. Free tools: Image Chef, Tux Paint and Doink, Wordle, Newspaper Generator, Animoto, PicLits, Tikatok Books, Dipity Timeline. Students like to create polls and tests using MyStudiyo.
Virginia Kuhn, Documentary is the New Black: Filmic Textbooks in the 21st Century Classroom
Students who are not cinema students even though they are located in the school of cinematic arts. Students take four years of classes with them, culminates in a multimedia thesis product in any discipline. The inaugural cohort finished their thesis projects last year. Students needed some facility with the tools, but also in creating a large-scale research project. She created IML340: The Praxis of New Media. Very lucky to have a lot of production staff. So there was a project ongoing: Iraqi Doctors on the Front Lines of Medicine, and they combined it with IML340 to create the Iraqi Doctors Project. Web site. Implications for large-scale public literacy. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television -- Jerry Mander, 1978 -- argued for books over television. With emergent technologies these days, we have time to go back and look and stop--which we couldn't in 1978. New collab with Brave New Films.
Marie Carianna and Derek Toten, Good! Bien! Ütz! Maya Language Learning from Guatemala to Tulane
Since the 1980s: six-week Kaqchikel Maya language and culture immersion course. Toten is speaking like an auctioneer--I can't keep up. Application is in a CD-ROM and online form. Have finished two units thus far. Within each topic, students initially see just the dialogue part of each lesson, and then they see the activities. Text captioning in Kaqchikel can be turned on or off. Lesson text available in Spanish or English. Online only: student can record their own utterances and compare with speakers'. The production happened over five trips to Guatemala during the summers. Post-production and application design in spring and fall. They hope to have the whole thing online by 2011. Two pedagogy specalists, two production folks. Use high-def cameras, lots of lights, microphones. A whole big production. Very careful with audio because it's for language learning.
Li Zhu and Michael Beahan, Dartmouth College, Jones Media Center: How do I. . .?
A multimedia center in the library. Beahan is director; Li Zhu ("Julie") is a year-long intern and graduate student. Many faculty were unaware that the media center offers more than DVDs and free scanning. So Julie put together a multimedia promo video to market their services to faculty, as well as an instructional video, tutorials, and even recorded their workshops for future use. The instructional video camera helps keep media center staff from getting burned out on answering the questions again and again. Instructional videos are no longer than 90 seconds. Videos are on the Jones Media Center website, on YouTube, and on the library's Facebook page.
Kate Borowske, Hamline University, Library on a Stick and On the Air
Borowske is a librarian and works with a low-residency MFA program in writing (?) for children and young adults. Three-pronged approach: toolbar, online workshops, recorded workshops. Toolbar allows them to search the resources they most frequently use--e.g. university or state databases, ebooks, literary criticism, journal literature. Conduit: Makes it easy to create toolbars. Series of four online workshops via Elluminate Live. Designed content around the toolbar. She wanted to show them all the resources, but have them anchored in the toolbar so they were easier to remember. Then she recorded the Elluminate sessions.
Larry Johnson, The NMC's Hakone (TM) Project: New Life for Second Life
Hakone, Japan is where NMC was born at an Apple forum in 1992. People would fly to Japan, write up their experiences on the way home, and send them out a couple weeks later. Johnson read from one such story which predicted the convergence of telecommunications and computing, and predicted that multimedia productions would once be available on compact disc. At the meeting, Apple announced it would launch the Newton. NMC has built a virtual forum that is a reflection of Hakone.
Paul Iwancio, Aaron Weidele, and William Shewbridge, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Taking Digital Stories on the Road
Wanted to commemorate the Meyerhoff Scholars program's 20th anniversary. Program promotes the participation of underrepresented people in science. Captured 60 stories during the two-day anniversary symposium by using a story booth they created. Black backdrop, chair, lights, video. Scouted locations ahead of time--a classroom, a coat closet, etc. Tried to negotiate the quietest locations possible. Bought a backdrop from a theatrical supply company. Scheduled the interviews--had a sign-up sheet. Had undergraduates currently in the Meyerhoff program conduct the interviews with alumni. When students weren't available, they had interviewees interview each other in pairs or groups of three. Distribution: Meyerhoff website, DVD (have distributed thousands of copies), YouTube. Future projects: homecoming, campus retreat, UMBC heritage project, department oral histories.
Morgan Reid, University of British Columbia, Talking to Our Computers? Transcribing Interview at 2:!!
Needed to transcribe data to text for qualitative analysis. Transcription services were too expensive for the amount of data he had. Check out "Voice Wreckognition" demo on Youtube--existing software was bad. Get high quality recording. Don't work from a live feed. 99% accuracy or better--no spelling mistakes, just an occasional incorrect word. Software: MacSpeech Dictate. Necessary: Express Scribe, any text editor, Dictate 1.2.1, good audio quality in data file, good quality microphone, really good audio isolation for listening. Nice demo!
Jared Bendis, Case Western Reserve University, Teaching the Elephant to Walk Itself: Self-Generating Pachyderm
Another rapid-fire speaker. Digital Case is an initiative of The Kelvin Smith Library. Digital library is an archive of collections, research, historical library materials, any intellectual output of the institution. Also meant to do dissemination, but almost no user interface--a common problem with digital archives. Decided to try to make a user interface with Pachyderm. 1. Log into your account. 2. Upload your assets. 3. Author your screens. 4. Publish your Pachyderm. More Advanced: integrate existing database assets into Pachyderm--museums can do this. Decided to use Pachyderm as an output standard instead of an authoring platform. Query a database, and the results are jpg, xml, and Pachyderm files. Authorship is in the curation of the collection--making a good database makes a good thing. Demo uses beta Pachyderm 2.1. No uploading to Pachyderm--generated from a database. What's next? Design new rule systems to be able to play with the database.
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