Archives For minnebar

MinneBar: Paul Cantrell on the future of art

10 May 2006

Paul on the Internet

Paul Cantrell is a blogger and music podcaster who also happens to be a software engineer. (I wonder which one is his superhero alter ego?) He spoke at last Saturday’s MinneBar conference on “The Internet and the Future of Art.” It was an interactive session which made things a bit tricky to record, but I think you’ll be able to hear most of the audience questions pretty well.

Just to keep things on topic for this blog, I think you could take most of what Paul says about the big music business and apply it to the educational business. He’s really talking about the “Long Tail,” which applies just as much to educational content as it does to artistic content.

Update: Here are the diagrams Paul created during his session.

Download: STP-MinneBar-PaulCantrell (17.9 MB, 38:45)

minnebar, barcamp, long tail, art

In Conferences, Savvy Technologist Podcast ,
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Minnebar: Mark McCahill on virtual worlds

8 May 2006

Croquet screenshot

Mark McCahill is from the University of Minnesota and is one of the architects of the Croquet Project, an open source peer-to-peer system for building virtual worlds like those found in World of Warcraft and Second Life. Those of you who’ve been around the Internet block a few times might remember one of Mark’s first projects, the University of Minnesota’s Gopher hypertext system.

This is a recording of Mark’s talk from the Minnebar conference entitled “Building Synthetic Worlds.” He hints at it in his talk, but there is great potential here for learning environments. Can you imagine meeting for a professional development session somewhere in a virtual world?

Download: STP-Minnebar-MarkMcCahill (20.5 MB, 44:32)

minnebar, barcamp, croquet, croquet project, virtual worlds

In Conferences, Savvy Technologist Podcast , , , ,
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BarCamp: The unconference

30 Apr 2006

I’ve been to enough conferences over the last three years to realize that the most valuable experiences are often the ones that happen over a round of beers after the day’s sessions are done. The most recent example was a fantastic conversation I had at FETC. These conversations form what amounts to a parallel conference experience.

So I was especially interested in BarCamp when I discovered it recently. The site proclaims:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees. Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join. When you come, be prepared to share with barcampers. When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

Barcamps tend to be small. It seems like 100 attendees is typical. The foremost Barcamp rule is “No spectators, only participants.” This isn’t just a theoretical interest. minnēbar is this Saturday, and I’m signed up as a participant. I’m not sure what I will present, but I’ve got a few days to figure that out. :-)

This brings up the ultimate point of this post, and that is to suggest that this kind of event lends itself especially well to ed tech folks. How cool would it be for even a dozen innovative tech-using educators to get together for a day of show-and-tell? I think we need a trial run at an Ed Tech BarCamp in the Twin Cities. Anyone interested?

barcamp, minnebar

In Conferences
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