ETUG wrap up

ETUG's over. All in all a very positive experience and the most grass-roots of 4 conferences I've attended in the last 4 months. Other sessions I didn't blog about were

1. Open source content: cultivating a culture of sharing our creativity with Chris Gratham. There was an interesting wiki for this session, but unfortunately the URL hasn't been added to the ETUG site.
2. Modeling Human Creativity with Steve DiPaola. Very interesting and wide-ranging. The best resource for this one is Steve's website: http://www.dipaola.org.
3. Mobile Content with David Vogt, Executive Director of the Mobile MUSE Network. We had an interesting discussion about things like citywide wifi, the politics of mobile computing and space as a function of electronically mediated interaction. The MUSE network website is http://mobilemuse.ca.

One other anecdote: I've been carrying around an ASUS Eee PC lately (more about this in a future post) and it generated a fair amount of interest at ETUG, even when I was sitting next to the guy with the mac air. Sucker.

What's on your Horizon?

Facilitators: Cyprien Lomas and Scott Leslie

Description: A conversation about the 2008 NMC Horizon Report. Each year the New Media Consortium produces The Horizon Report (http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Main_Page), an attempt to forecast some of the emerging technologies and forces that will affect education in the coming years. This year’s report identified grassroots video, collaboration webs, mobile broadband, data mashups, collective intelligence and social operating systems as 6 emerging technologies that will influence higher education over the next 5 years. Join two of the Horizon Report's Advisory Board members for an open discussion about the newly released 2008 report, as well as an opportunity to share your own experiences around a host of innovative and disruptive technologies that are offering both new opportunities and challenges for educators and support staff.


I actually took copious notes for this session, but the session wiki and the horizon document itself pretty much cover it. Both of these links contain a lot of useful information, and the wiki particularly has links to several very interesting online apps / tools.

ETUG: Pachyderm

Session: Pachyderm: Rich media presentations (2 hr hands-on lab)

Facilitators: Negin Mirriahi and Angela Lam

Description: No technical skills required! This hands-on workshop will introduce Pachyderm, an easy-to-use open source flash based multimedia authoring tool designed for instructors, instructional designers, and students who have little or no skills in multimedia development. Participants will be shown samples of finished Pachyderm presentations and guided through creating their own sample presentation that could be uploaded on any website or imported into a Course Management System. Arts ISIT within the Faculty of Arts at UBC has been one of the initial developers of Pachyderm and currently supports the use of Pachyderm at UBC for both face-to-face and online distance classes.

Pachyderm 2.0

Open source rich media web publishing tool.

Flash based. Requires no local install.

Templates available—seems largely template based, but it's difficult to edit existing templates.

End constant can be uploaded to server or CMS.

Not really accessible... no default alt tag... difficult to parse with a screen reader.

Advantages:

• Easy to use
• Instructors will not require a lot of support

Limitations:

• highly visual.
• Limited number of template
• hard to change the templates
• templates must be build in flash, and therefore requires programming experience to modify.
• Totally inaccessible.
• Hard to make changes on the fly: requires storyboarding.

Bottom line: A good session, but this is not a useful tool, not only because of its lack of accessibility, but also because it lacks flexibility and an intuitive interface.

ETUG: Educational Technology Users Group

I'm at the ETUG conference right now:

The Educational Technology Users Group (ETUG) is a community of BC post-secondary educational practitioners focused on the ways in which learning and teaching can be enhanced through technology.

I'm pleasantly surprised at the quality of this little conference. It's very grassroots and the right kind of nerdy. Perhaps next year I'll submit a request to speak.

In any case, notes from the conference floor will follow.

A note for conference organizers: recently I also attended the BCLA and CLA conferences, but they didn't offer free WIFI for participants, so they merited no blogging on my part.