I agree that the deep, connected, ongoing reflective process invited by blogs is a huge gift–I like the way you asked them to consider their n with others, too. My students, when coming up with the course rubrics, decided upon growth, participation, risk, effort and quality–and they realized that all of these areas involved their individual efforts to write, and their interaction with the others in the class, online and in person. In a culture that prizes the individual’s efforts, it is not so easy moving students from thinking about self first, to thinking about learning first, and when they do that, they see how serving the group means serving the learning means serving the self.

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One of my major themes was social learning. This occurred during synchronous times but more deeply away from class. I required them to reflect on this in terms of how the helped others and how others helped them. For the most part, this was the most satisfying part for me. These blended models of learning are becoming more and more appealing for reasons you suggest.

Great banner across the top of the blog btw.

I look forward to reading more!

Cheers!

Presenting with the collage this past week was exciting indeed. It was quite something to see the collage on the big screen, to click on the little speech bubble and have the links, the videos, the audio all work very well indeed. I was a little clumsy with the slider to move the collage, but that will improve with time as I learn to work with it.
This kind of tool makes such sense to me–mash-ups of this sort are visual poetry, Alan and Jim-you are so right–and why shouldn’t we see presentations as performance art? Lanny, I think the visuals, if we use them, should engage the audience as much as our personal intensity–they are a part of that intensity. I want to stir my audience, to provoke them, to move them to action. I don’t always succeed, mind you, (especially when I present after dinner–10 p.m. my time– after everyone has had a long long day of travel, including me) but if we’re not trying to change the world, then why are we giving talks at all?

And as for practice and growing the ideas, I agree absolutely, Lanny. I am always essentially going at the same ideas in my talks, just trying to discover more about them each time.

I concur with redbaiters that your commitment and intensity come through in the presentations and for me that is more important than the visual show on the screen. But I guess you have to go through the thinking of what you would want to see if you were in the audience and satisfy that. How else can you determine what to present, especially to a group with whom you are not already familiar.

One last comment on the need for invention. I agree with that, for sure. But having tried something, it’s not always the case that it is perfected the first time out. There is some joy in doing it better. It’s not the same as something fundamentally new, but it is important. So I hope you don’t redo the entire talk each time and that some of which you recycle gets better with experience.

Collage seems very rich and I am anxious to see what your thoughts are or better, what the audience does with it. Certainly not powerpoint comas. I’d been mulling recently about trying to do a presentation via PicLens, but collage is rather nicely fluid.

I’d have to agree very much with the Reverend Jim- after reading your words and watching your photos for years, seeing you present at Faculty Academy was mesmerizing– I think you could read me a soup can label and make it come alive. Its more than the rich media, it is the message, the energy, and really a whole lotta passion for what you are saying. Strange how that is a rare commodity.

Jerry Slezak had mentioned Vovux to me, and what little time I spent in it totally inspired me, you have one lucky audience. And only partially because of the presentation medium –what struck me so deeply about your presentation at Faculty Academy last year (and why that talks sticks in the back of my mind like a flashing red reminder of all that is imperative) was the pure intensity of your delivery and the fervent passion with which you challenged the audience to challenge their assumptions about the future of teaching.

That said, leaving a poetic trace of a presentation with a tool like Vuvox suggests something very tactile about the web that makes its complex relationship to displaced time and actual events that much more compelling. The thought that a presentation can also be an online performance piece that can be stumbled upon or sought after for a wide variety of reasons is intriguing.

In fact, it is how we should be presenting, with an eye toward the very media we are examining. This for me was what was so amazing about Brian’s Confessions of a Mashup-Unartist piece, and it was a call to arms for me that If I am going to present on a particular digital medium, I should really be embedded in it. All a part of exemplifying the process and taking the necessary risks to fail and learn, as so many others will and should.

I find it hard to be a critic in my role as an instructional technologist if I can’t truly engage the very creative process I am championing with students and professors. Presentations as digital performances makes so much sense to me, and transforms the idea of a presentation from a task to a joyful obsession. Good luck, I’ll be following all the traces I can find.

We introduced blogs to the kids this year and while it has not been without it’s struggles, they seem to be taking off. I too have noticed that we are able to bridge the two worlds together. Most recently though, I have discovered that we have been able to open up another world when the reality brings us something that we do not know how to comfortably deal with face-to face. My student’s blogs have allowed them to open up some of their inner thoughts and feelings to share support and concern that no one wants to speak out loud. It’s an interesting journey, one that I hope the children will continue on long after they leave me in June.