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’m prompted to make this plea because at the moment I’m working on the Short List for the Horizon Report: 2009 Australia-New Zealand Edition. The Short List has a formula. It contains 12 topics — four on each horizon — and each topic is one page long. That one page has to include a description of what the topic is, why it’s relevant for education, examples of projects or programs that use it, and two or three sources of additional information. And it’s ONE PAGE. (Hence the name, Short List.)

I’d really like to include this review of JOYity, a location-based game for Android phones, in the examples list for the topic I’m working on right now. Since the Short List is distributed and used in all kinds of ways, I can’t rely on an embedded link — I need to state it explicitly. But I have about two lines per example, which is barely enough to describe whatever it is AND include the link. So it’s really frustrating to get a URL like this: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/27/the-joy-of-joyity-bringing-massive-multiplayer-trans-reality-games-to-android-phones/

Go read the article, it’s great. The game looks really cool. I just need to find a way to shoehorn that ugly URL into half a line. I tried using a URL shortener on a previous Short List, but it didn’t fly; we like to see the source (the “TechCrunch” in the URL is actually important). If only the URL had been shortened when the post was made. Alas!

Please, take just a second and chop the extra nine words off your long URLs. Please. Maybe you’ll make it into the Horizon Report!
</rant>

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!

The thing I was dreading the most was The Great Email Migration. I had at least four years of email on my PC — yes I am a packrat, I have learned to live with this — and as I actually USE a lot of it, I wanted to keep it in some form that I could access. Like, say, email.

Lucky for me, NMC has Cogdog on tap, and he tossed me a link to this article about two ways to make the switch (one free, one easy). Turns out the easy way was only $10 away from free so I opted for that, and boy am I glad I did.

I downloaded the free test version of Little Machines’ O2M, which will convert five files just so you can see that it works, and I ran it. It worked. So I bought the full version, I made a backup of my .pst file from Outlook just in case, and I started it converting. If you do this, make sure you launch Outlook before you launch O2M, or O2M will not be able to find Outlook. Also, turn off your automatic send/receive for the duration or O2M might get confused.

I did not ask it to convert my calendar, since I use Google Calendar anyway. I did ask it to convert my contacts, but Outlook made 3 copies of my contacts some time ago (don’t ask) and I wasn’t sure which ones I actually wanted, so in the end I ignored the contacts file and just used my iPhone to update Address Book on the Mac, which worked fine. So all I really used O2M for was my email.

It took about 30 hours to convert all my email to the mbox files — I asked it to also convert all attachments, which is an option you can take or leave, so it took a lot longer than if I hadn’t done that. O2M does have some dialog box issues; if someone sent you email and used a secure signature, O2M will alert you for every single email, saying it won’t be securely signed anymore, and ask if you want to save it anyway (there’s no “yes to all” option), which stops the process each time until you click. I also got a repeated system error saying some process had quit unexpectedly, but this does not seem to have borked anything that I can find; and there was one other case where O2M popped up a dialog and stopped converting until I told it Yes to whatever it was, but overall it was pretty painless.

I ended up with a 3.7GB directory of my email, which I copied onto the Mac. I set up my Mail account and downloaded the new mail that had come in while I had Outlook disabled. Then, by following the very straightforward user manual on the O2M website, I was able to import my mail into Mail on the mac, which took a lot less time than saving it out — under an hour, all told. Finally, I renamed and rearranged my mail folders, since I was using some bizarre Outlook-enforced scheme of categorization that made no sense at all. All my mail came in fine, attachments and all. I had to mark it all as read, because I am that kind of OCD person, but that only took a few minutes too. Now I am happy as a clam with my email in place on my new Mac.

The only drawback — really, the only thing I miss about the PC, and I miss it very much — is that there’s no Xobni for Mac Mail. That would make life quite seriously perfect.

The occasion of the update is partly that I got a shiny new title: Vice President, NMC Services. Yup, that’s Ms. Veep to you. Although as my co-worker Alan notes, the family is having fun with the change. I got a celebratory clink of wine glasses, and then after that it was all teasing all the time. So that’s how a vice president fixes salad. I would have thought the avocadoes would be more neatly chopped. That looks more like a director’s salad to me… and so on.

Well, back to the bio. Out of curiosity, what do you all think I do?

Let’s talk about LinkedIn. I’ve been meaning to get, er, linked in for a while now, but only actually did it this morning after reading Alan’s very appropriately titled post on the topic. The very first thing I did was to send a couple of gauche, uncustomized invitations to co-workers (sorry guys). I hate, repeat hate, that I have to bother someone in order to add them as a contact. Yeah, I see the point; we don’t want unknown losers claiming us as their friends, and we want to be careful about who gets to contact whom. But can’t the email thing happen somewhere else? Like when I actually try to impinge on these people I claim to know by asking for introductions or information? Gah!

I was enticed by the two-degrees thing… I like the mathematics of it. And really, LinkedIn is a cool idea, and may yet prove to be a useful service for me. But I have sent four unsolicited emails to my friends, and it turns out that’s my limit. I just hate spamming people I know. So if all four of them admit to knowing me, I’ll have a little list of four contacts and I can enjoy the mathematics of that. And maybe other people who know me will spam me to become their contact (which is fine; if you know me, consider this an open invitation to add me as a LinkedIn contact). In the meantime I will slink off the site and try to shake off the greasy spammer feeling I got left with.

You can follow some of my progress by peeking at my 2007 Horizon link list on del.icio.us. It’s not comprehensive, but I’m adding to it as I work my way through the topics. Many of the links in there were supplied by our Advisory Board. Some were found via search or serendipity (which is my favorite aspect of this part of the project).