I used Illustrator to not suck when I drew this

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon at Adobe with NMC CEO Larry Johnson. We talked with folks from Adobe’s higher education division, and we saw some really, really cool stuff. One thing that I loved is Adobe Rome (see the video demo of Rome from MAX 2009 last October). Rome is going to be a fantastic tool for K12 mediamaking and collaboration, I think. It makes it easy to pull together different kinds of media along with text and drawings, and then to output the project in different ways. I really want my son to play with it, because I’m curious about how the tool will feel to a young person. It looked very intuitive to me, but then I’ve been using Photoshop and Illustrator longer than my son’s been alive, so it’s hard to say how a new, inexperienced user would see it. The demo just blew me away because of what could be done with it in schools, if the Big 3 Issues are properly addressed (what does it cost? can I make the kids’ work private? do I need to install and maintain it?). I have high hopes.

We also saw some of the new features coming up in CS5, but I’m not sure which ones have already been revealed so I’ll just say this: Wow. I am so excited about what I saw. Photoshop in particular has some new powerful features that I look forward to playing with, and there are some other treats coming out as well. Keep an eye out for CS5 and Rome!

Point Lobos landscape

At the NMC Summer Conference this year, Larry Johnson, Alan Levine and I tried something different: we actually attended a preconference session. Crazy, I know! It was a photography workshop led by Bill Frakes (Sports Illustrated) and Don Henderson (Apple), with Bill Hanson (Apple). The session was planned and organized by Larry and the three of them, and included a full day walk along the California coast at Point Lobos State Reserve near Carmel, California, followed by a half-day post-production workshop using Aperture.

It was an amazing day. Larry loaned me his Nikon D70 and some killer zoom lenses. I filled up 3 memory cards with the 1,038 pictures I made (the best of which are in a set on Flickr). The whole experience — the scenery, the company, the exploring and learning — was so moving. Partly out of gratitude to Bill F. and Don for leading the workshop, and partly out of reluctance to let go of the experience, I started a Voicethread piece and invited the other participants to comment (please feel free to add your comments, too, if you wish).

In the post-production session, we each selected our five best photos (give or take); the selections were to include one landscape, one flora/fauna/nature shot, one portrait showing emotion, and whatever else we liked. Bill Hanson created a video slideshow of the photos we picked (see the Quicktime version here) that was aired during one of the plenaries at the conference. What a thrill to see them up there on the big screen!

reaching

I spent the morning at Big Rock Ranch, which was once and may still be part of Skywalker Ranch (yes THAT Skywalker Ranch) and which is where GLEF makes its home. Marin County teachers and multimedia enthusiasts gathered to talk about multimedia in Marin’s schools. The event was sponsored by GLEF, the Marin County Office of Education, and the Marin Learning Conservancy.

The program was short — 8:30 to noon — but packed a big punch. Kristina Woolsey kicked it off by telling us all about the Golden Age of Multimedia and specifically the MacMagic Classroom, which started in 1991 at Davidson Middle School, and ran right up until last year. She showed a video of kids in the program that was just amazing: using multimedia in a collaborative environment to create projects that showcased learning and included student reflections on the process and on their own personal development.

Afterward, there was a panel discussion featuring two of the teachers from the 1991 MacMagic classroom (Karla Kelly and Steve Arnold), Kristina Woolsey, Reed School District Superintendent Chris Carter, and 8th grade teacher Anthony Armstrong. We talked about how technology tools can help kids get past learning blockages, and how teachers are really working on the same things now that they were then, although the tools have gotten more diverse and plentiful.

Anthony Armstrong spoke next, and he totally knocked my socks off. This is not to say that Kristina didn’t; I think my socks have been so repeatedly knocked off by Kristina that I just check them at the door when I go to hear her speak. Anthony teaches 8th grade history in Marin and he talked about how he uses Wikispaces in his classes. And he really uses Wikispaces. He knows it inside and out, and he pulls in videos and polls and Wordle diagrams and all kinds of other tools too. His students have to use primary source material that he pulls together and links from the wiki — including texts, videos, images, and everything you can think of — to construct their own understanding of events in United States history. Anthony is very firmly off the stage in his class, and the students are on it. His kids work collaboratively to understand why people made the historical decisions they did, to argue for other options that might have happened, to explain the context of events… they debate and write and record videos… and they do the wiki work as homework. In class, they work in groups using their own pencil-and-paper notes to have conversations about what they have discovered in their research. In short, at the end of his talk, all of us in that room were ready to enroll in his class. I know I was.

When he was done, the panel came up again to talk about how that kind of teaching and learning can happen in more classrooms. Anthony credited colleagues (in particular, Jennifer Carrier Dorman) that he met through their blogs for giving him ideas and helping him along the way, and pointed out that a lot of this work exists, because other teachers have put together things for their classes. He encouraged other teachers to reach out and contact someone whose projects they admire or have questions about.

All in all, it was an amazing morning. I came away with some practical things I can use, too, even though I’m not a teacher: a new angle for Smart Objects, which I’m struggling with for the K-12 Horizon Report right now; ideas for how to work on projects at home with my own son, who is in 3rd grade and not bored by learning, and who won’t ever be if I can help it; and a renewed desire to help public education be something more than what a lot of it is now, instead of just turning my back on it as I am so often tempted to do.

Thanks to all who organized and spoke at the event today. I am so glad to have gone.

These are the voyages of the ed tech speaker. Her continuing mission: to explore strange new presentation tools; to seek out new ways to keep her audiences awake; to boldly go where no PowerPoint has gone before.

I just finished putting together the presentation on the 2009 Horizon Report that I will be delivering tomorrow at Sonoma State University, where they are kind enough to ask me back every year around this time. Last year, I crammed at least 90 minutes of information into about 55 minutes, accompanying my speed talking performance with a respectable, if uninteresting, PowerPoint. Those poor people.

Later in the year, I gave a keynote at the Midwest Library Technology Conference 2008 along with my colleague Alan Levine. Spurred by a mutual desire not to use PowerPoint, we created the presentation in the beta version of VuVox, which was fun but a little frustrating because of a couple of bugs. (You can see that preso here.)

THIS year, what should drop into my lap but Prezi, a Flash-based presentation tool that I can only say is yummy. It’s also in beta, but Alan had a log in and said I could use it. (Thanks, Alan!) So, having prepared the back up PowerPoint just in case (I’m adventuresome, not stupid), I went in and started messing around.

Prezi gives you an endless (well, not really, but near enough) artboard, like Illustrator. There’s a lovable little menu, with a limited (but not really limiting) set of choices, that takes about twenty seconds to get the hang of. You drop your content on the artboard, and move it around; Prezi takes images and videos (flash only), and you can add text blocks. You group the content using “frames,” which helps with navigation. And that’s about all you have to master, except for the underlying concept that scale doesn’t matter.

Prezi will zoom in on objects or content groups when you click them, so your presentation can have a huge range of scales. I LOVED this once I actually got the hang of it. My first instinct was to lay everything out as though I were going to print it as a poster, with only the range of sizes that are visible all at once. But that doesn’t really take advantage of what makes Prezi so interesting. You can nest content areas, so one frame can contain multiple sections that are too small to see at first.

A finished Prezi can be used two ways: either you step through using the forward and back arrows (you set the path as you create the content, so you zoom where you want in the order you want), or you just click frames and objects that interest you. Either way, whenever you go from one thing to something that’s a different scale, Prezi zooms in or out, centers, and tilts whatever you are seeing so that you can read it.

What I really liked:

• It was incredibly easy to make something that looks really good.
• It was fun to use!
• It autosaves. You can save manually too.
• The zebra wheel lets you tilt, size, and move any object just by clicking it.
• The zooming and tilting looks really cool when you step through a presentation.
• Almost everything I wanted to do was do-able, and the stuff that wasn’t, wasn’t really necessary.

What I didn’t like so much:

• I could not find a way to attach a URL to an object. The only way I found was to type out the whole URL, and then that text becomes a link. But I wanted to link pictures and things.
• There are not many design schemes to pick from (yet?). I like the basic one, but I wanted a white background so I could hide the white background on some of my images. I had issues with transparent backgrounds (i.e. they didn’t work).
• I wanted to be able to choose my own set of fonts. You get three per design, which is perfect, but I wanted to change just one of the three in the design I used.
• Although there’s an option to download your presentation so you can play it without the Internet, it doesn’t seem to be working.
• Prezi spawns windows at an alarming rate. When I saved & closed my presentation, there were three Prezi parent windows open. I have no idea where they all came from.

On the whole, I have to say that I like it a lot. I used it for hours and was having fun the whole time. No angry frustration, no puzzled pauses, no “is-it-this-software-or-am-I-just-stupid?” moments. My professional, unbiased opinion is YAY-I-LOVE-PREZI!!

Take a look at the presentation. It’s text heavy, but I did that on purpose so that it can be used without me standing there talking.

You can try Prezi yourself, even without a beta account, by playing with their demo at www.Prezi.com. Go on. It’s fun. And work should be fun.

Now, if my iPhone could only do Flash, I could carry this around with me. I’d be the life of the party!

Back in the mists of time (technologically speaking) I wrote about learning objects, and one of the things I wrote is that learning objects should be designed to make it easy for the creator and others to reuse or repurpose them. This was the conventional wisdom of the day, but I don’t think it holds true any more.

The important thing now is not reusability. The important thing now is customization. It needs to be easy — really, really, ridiculously easy — to create something new. To reverse engineer. To change your mind, customize your message, substitute a different flavor, get the sauce on the side.

Back when I preached reusability, it was hard to make learning objects, and the amount of effort that had to be put into one justified the claim that reusability was desirable. But it needs to not be hard. We need ways that people — and not just geeky people — can decide one afternoon that they want to make a learning object (or call it what you will) and have it ready by dinnertime. It needs to be point-click-drag-click-clickclickclick easy. The tech isn’t there yet, at least not for everyone, but it’s getting very close.

Like Brian’s mashups, these things will have little existing pieces of other things pulled into them. This means the barrier we face isn’t just technological. We need to rethink ideas of ownership, permissions, fair use, and copyright. We need a model that works, so people can grab stuff, make stuff, and share stuff, and assemble it into a learning-object-of-the-moment. These things don’t have to last forever. I want something that responds to my instant need to communicate information by letting me pull words and sounds and clips and pictures and stuff together instantly. Let’s call it the Teachable Moment Authoring System.

“…today, for the first time ever, we’re releasing some of the best TED talks to the public, and I would like to request your help in letting people know just how a special a treat they have in store.

“The talks are available as a podcast series, TEDTalks, at http://www.ted.com/tedtalks and http://tedblog.typepad.com. We’ve launched with six remarkable talks – in audio and video – and will add more each week. Thanks to a partnership with BMW, all the talks will be entirely FREE.

“It’s a big moment: Until now, the TED experience has been limited to 1,000 people each year. But we’ve always known these talks deserve a much wider audience. Indeed, the whole vision of my foundation which owns TED, is to leverage the power of ideas to make a difference in the world. Now thanks to the maturation of online video and podcasting, and the visionary sponsorship of BMW we can share some of the best of TED widely for the first time. We’re excited about this and trust that you share our enthusiasm.

“I hope you’ll make the time to rediscover some of the most moving presentations from TED2006: Al Gore’s sage advice on living a carbon-neutral life; Hans Rosling’s inspired interpretation of global statistics; Ken Robinson’s vision for an education system that values creativity; Majora Carter’s commitment to environmental justice; Tony Robbins’ roadmap for reaching our potential; and David Pogue’s software-inspired show tunes. We’ve launched with these six, and will add more weekly, pulling primarily from TED2006 and TEDGlobal, but also dipping into previous years.”

I’m over the moon. Go listen to Hans Rosling’s talk. Then listen to the others. Then do it again. Then tell a friend…

[Edited to add categories, which for some reason I keep forgetting to do]

I've also seen the neat stuff faculty here are doing with their courses. Wikis, blogs, digital storytelling, moviemaking — it's all here. The faculty are sharing the process, the ups and downs, what worked and what didn't, all with frankness and humor. There's a fantastic atmosphere of support and a willingness to learn from each other that's wonderful to see. I'm thrilled and honored to be a guest here.

Take a look at the conference blog — we're writing it as we go!