all work, all play

Last Friday CCNMTL hosted a mini-conference on New Media and Education (pics). Me and my colleague Dan Beeby co-presented a marathon series of workshops on Sakai and Web Services. We repeated each of our two 35 minute talks 3 times over the day (2x3 talks == a very long day), and I can't wait for the video's to be published so I can see the rest of the conference ;-)

The first talk unfolded into a conversation about Course/Content Mgmt systems, open/community source ecologies, and the purposeful use of tools w/in those environments. The second talk covered rss, blogging, delicious, flickr, odeo, and the balance between push and pull. The participants were attentive and engaged, and I although the pace was brutal, I really enjoyed working on these presentations.

The funny thing about giving 6 talks in one day, is that by the third talk in, I couldn't remember if I had used a particular phrase two slides back, or two hours back... Luckily, Dan and I knew the material cold, had a good rapport, and were very comfortable swapping lines and improvising. The only glitch was due to flickr not refreshing their feed for over 24 hours... can't expect much more from an external service (more on that in a future post).

The slides got a little mangled on the html export, but here they are: An Instructors Guide to Sakai & Courseworks Remodeled.

Dan has a great touch in photoshop, so careful what sorts of pictures you leave laying around his desk.