Monthly Archives: December 2005

Podcasting presentation video (mostly)

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I’ve had a number of requests to share the slides from my recent Podcasting 101 presentation at the TIES Conference. Here they are in PDF format (3.7 MB). As I posted previously, there isn’t much text on the slides so they probably won’t make much sense on their own. Thanks to Cory Vandenberghe from the Veldhiezen Group, there’s also a video of the first 20 minutes of my presentation. (Technical difficulties with the video camera prevented a recording of the entire session.)

The video was created with Veldhiezen’s Q-Sharp presentation tool. I don’t know a lot about it, but I can see many uses for a tool like Q-Sharp for professional development in a school district.

ties2005, qsharp

Dan McCreary: Metadata, SIF, and interoperability

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Dan McCreary has been around the block a time or two in his years of working in the technology industry. He’s worked at cutting edge technology companies and started companies of his own. His latest project was building a data dictionary for the Minnesota Dept of Education.

Our conversation centered on metadata and interoperability issues. Many of you are familiar with SIF, probably the most widely known effort to build a standardized framework for communicating about education data. Dan explains a lot of the background information about metadata, XML, OWL, ISO 11179, and other alphabet soup acronyms that, once you understand a bit about them, make SIF more comprehensible. We also discuss how interoperability fits into the future of online learning, student transcripts, and standardized testing. Finally, Dan’s got some tips for school technology leaders as they evaluate vendors who claim that their products interoperate.

This one’s more technical that most of my podcasts, but there’s some good stuff in there. Let your inner greek out for recess and give it a listen.

Download: STP-DanMcCreary (16.2 MB, 35:10)

Palos Verdes Hot Shrimp

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Have you ever had a really cool idea and hoped like crazy that you were the first to think of it? I had that experience just last night as I got ready for bed, having just finished posting some photos to a Christmas photoset on Flickr.

One of our favorite things to eat for almost all holidays is “Palos Verdes Hot Shrimp,” a wonderfully spicy concoction that burns the lips but tastes oh so good. My idea was to post a photo of the dish on Flickr and include the recipe in the photo description. Sadly, at least one person beat me to this idea. I might have improved on the idea by including the major ingredients as individual tags. If that caught on it would be a pretty slick way of finding a recipe that includes a particular ingredient (or two or three). You can use the Flickr advanced search to search by multiple tags or even the titles and descriptions.

What does this have to do with educational technology? Not much other than promoting some of the cool stuff you can do with Flickr. But I hearby challenge all of you to post a photo of your favorite holiday dish along with the recipe. Then come back here and post a link to it in the comments. I can see it now, the ed tech blogger holiday cookbook.

Tech guy for hire

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My school district got an unpleasant surprise recently when the auditors discovered a shortfall of $4.3 million for the 2004-2005 budget year. The district has prepared a plan to make up the shortfall as quickly as possible, but the bad news for me is that the plan means that my position is being eliminated at the end of June.

I wasn’t caught completely off guard by this, but I’m certainly disappointed. It’s been a pleasure to work in a genuinely visionary school district over the last few years. In many ways I feel like my tenure in Hopkins has been the equivalent of a graduate degree in educational and technology leadership.

I guess I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, so I prefer to view this situation as an opportunity to consider all employment options. My family and I would prefer to stay in the Twin Cities, but who knows what possibilities will emerge. I know I have readers from around the world and I guess this is one of those times when networking of the human kind is especially valuable. If you’re a regular reader you probably already have a pretty good idea of the kind of work I like to do. Please don’t hesitate to let me know about interesting employment opportunities by emailing me at tim@technosavvy.org. I’m most interested in technology integration or Director of Technology jobs at this point, but would certainly be open to other ideas.

Whatever happens, I’ll definitely keep blogging.

work, career, hopkins public schools

Del.icio.us power user tips

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Whether you’re just getting started with Del.icio.us or have hundreds of bookmarks, you’ll probably find something new in “The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users” at the Slacker Manager blog. Habit #3, “Use the inbox,” looks particularly interesting. It seems like it’s possible to build up a complex set of del.icio.us subscriptions that can be subscribed to in one feed. This would be a great way to track particular users, groups of users, or tags all in one place. Nothing you couldn’t do with separate feeds, but interesting nonetheless.

del.icio.us

The bulletless presentation

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Podcasting 101 title slide

I resolved for my recent podcasting presentation at the TIES Conference to avoid bullet points entirely in my Keynote slides. I was motivated in part by some reading I’ve been doing at Presentation Zen, a blog devoted “professional presentation design.” Two posts in particular, “Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic” and “The ‘Lessig Method’ of presentation,” were particularly inspirational. I didn’t take it to the “Lessig” extreme (although I admire it), but it did end up being more “visual” than a typical presentation.

I couldn’t have done made it work as easily without iStockPhoto and the Creative Commons search at Flickr. I purchased a couple photos from iStockPhoto for $2 each which is much less than typical stock photo prices. The real gold mine was Flickr, however. I found half a dozen great photos licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that illustrated my talk beautifully. I simply added a small photo credit to each one and used them in full confidence that I was not violating copyright in any way. (Have I mentioned how much I like Creative Commons in the last week or so? I guess I just did.) :-)

I’m going to continue in this presentation mode for a while. It’s quite a nice change from the ordinary.

ties2005, istockphoto, creative commons, flickr, lawrence lessig, presentation design

Audio podcast search technology

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A friend and fellow U. of MN grad student pointed me to an article in Wired called Podcast Chaos Be Gone which brought me to Podzinger, an online service that scans audio podcasts and uses speech recognition technology to create transcripts.

I submitted the Savvy Technologist Podcast recently and was informed a few days later that my podcasts had been analyzed and were ready for searching. A quick search for “digital storytelling” brings up my recent podcast with Michael Searson with links to the sections of the podcast where that text was spoken. Pretty cool. Unfortunately, it appears that RealPlayer and IE 5.0 are required to play the clips directly from the search results page. RSS feeds are available for all search results which means that you could subscribe to a feed that should notify you if any particular word or phrase is spoken in any podcast that Podzinger has indexed.

podzinger, speech recognition, savvy technologist podcast