I was able to put together a version of the presentation as an "enhanced podcast" using a borrowed copy of Garage Band '06. It worked very well for the task, with one glaring issue - apparently GB can't handle audio longer than 65 minutes, so the last couple of minutes of the presentation audio is truncated. No big loss, as it's mostly just wrapup (and there is an 11-minute section of awesome Q and A around the 30 minute mark - at the "Wiki Discussion" chapter).

I can't believe it's been 20 years since the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff on January 28, 1986. I can still remember seeing that horrific column of smoke and fire from the still-burning boosters. Damned frozen O-rings and dysfunctional communication in NASA.

Christa McAuliffe was to be the first schoolteacher in space, sent up as a payload specialist. She's the one most remembered, but all seven crewmembers were lost in that tragic accident. I still shudder thinking of the ride they must have had, trapped in the cockpit as it fell to the water...

I'd planned on releasing a full presentation+audio version of the presentation, but it's going to take me weeks to sync up the 105 slides to the 1-hour audio track.

So, in the meantime, here's the audio-only portion of the presentation (27.2MB MP3). Not sure how well it stands on its own, but it might come in handy for someone.

The only editing I've done to the audio was to remove the 6 minute preamble and embarrassing intro (as Mr. Expert Guy - gack - which is why you hear me mention it at the beginning of the audio). Sorry for the audio quality - it was recorded directly to my iPod via Belkin TuneTalk at an incredible 8KHz, and tweaked in Audacity to make it suck less.

This is a demo.

I just put the almost-finishing touches on a presentation I'll be giving to folks in the Faculty of Education tomorrow. The topic? It's basically a tour of things like wikis, weblogs, RSS and podcasting, with a presentation at the beginning, some live demos, and some hands-on time. Essentially "The Read/Write Web 101"

I merged a couple of my other presentations (intro to weblogs and intro to wiki) and added some refinements. It's grown to 105 slides, which sounds scary, but there isn't a bullet point in the bunch, and most slides are only on the Big Screen to give a background while I talk about something. I'm guessing the presentation will run between 30 minutes and an hour, depending on audience participation. We've got a 3-hour slot, and would like to have as much "hands-on" time as possible.

Brian's asking for comments to help build a presentation tonight. I'm cutting it awfully close to the wire (the presentation starts in just over an hour) but hopefully another trackback will help...

What is most significant about the emergence of blogs and/or wikis?

The biggest thing about these self-publishing tools is that they're self-publishing, natch. You don't need to be a geek to be able to publish to the 'net anymore - and this stuff has the potential to "fix" the web, which was supposed to be a dynamic network of linked content published by individuals, but got co-opted into a variation of the TV broadcast model, with users sitting in front of glowing screens receiving the content that The Man wants to feed them (picture a scene from Max Headroom or something). Instead, we can effectively publish our own content, with whatever authority we can muster. Individuals are just as able as companies (large and small) - as an example, this blog currently has a Google rank of 6, which is higher ranked than some companies. That would have been impossible without easy and effective self-publishing tools.

My Life, My Blog, My So Called Diary

Originally uploaded by Looking For Fish Tacos At ELI 2006.

Not sure if I can cross off one of my 43Things - which is to write a novel. Apparently I'm an accomplished pulp sci fi author. I've since moved on from writing about cats, though...

Seriously, though - be sure to check out Alan Levine and Brian Lamb's latest wild and wacky presentation: Beyond The Blog. They've put the online resources up already, in the form of a Flickr album. Alan's sheer bliss at stretching metaphors shows through in spades, along with Brian's literary sarcasm ;-)

Man, does THIS take me back. C64 Games Online - a collection of old games from the Commodore 64, ported to java as applets. I have no idea how many hours I wastedspent playing these games as a kid.

My faves:

• Commando
• Ghostbusters
• Blue Max
• Spy vs. Spy
• Commando II
• Pitfall
• Pitstop
• Falcon Patrol
• Leaderboard Golf - spent DAYS playing this with my dad and brother...
• Kick Start II
• Beach Head - Level 3
• Pole Position
• Kick Start - Off-Road Simulator
• Operation Wolf
• Batman Part II:The Caped Crusader
• Rampage
• Attack of the Mutant Camels
• Rick Dangerous II

It's odd, because I was remembering the graphics as not totally sucking. I guess it's not bad for a 2MHz processor and 64KB of RAM though...

I just updated my copy of Blogbridge to the latest weekly (2.12) and in this version they threw the switch on OPML publishing of folders/guides of feeds. I took a couple of minutes to gather my education-related subscriptions into one guide, and tried publishing it as OPML.

D'Arcy's Wild and Wacky Edublogs Reading List

It contains 102115 feeds of edubloggy goodness. There are some stale feeds that I just can't bring myself to delete (you know, in case they ever post something). If you're using an aggregator that groks live OPML feeds, just subscribe to the URL. If you're using anything else, you may need to download the OPML and manually import it.

There are lots of people (Gardner, Brian, Tama, some /. trolls) posting interesting and thoughtful responses to the iTunes University service. It seems like the (online) consensus is something like "It sucks as a concept - forcing universities to lock content behind walled gardens, restricting access and requiring proprietary playback mechanisms."

This is a valid point, worth consideration. However, at the risk of appearing to be an Apple apologist, I'd suggest that the alternatives be considered.

Yojimbo 1.0 was just released - by Bare Bones Software (the folks that make the kick-ass editor BBEdit), and it looks like the best personal content manager I've used. DevonThink is overly complicated, and Notational Velocity is a little to simple (but that is also its strength).

Yojimbo takes the best of both approaches, and distills it all into a simple (but powerful) interface on top of some powerful (and elegant) features.

I would have blogged this sooner, but was having The Day From Hellâ„¢ - regardless, this is pretty cool stuff. Apple has opened up the iTunes media warehouse for any campus to share audio and video via the iTMS interface. This will allow any campus to replicate something like the Stanford iTunes Experience relatively easily, with the possibility to hook into things like lecturecasting, alumni communication, community outreach, etc...

I'm going to be cheerleading and doing whatever I can to get the University of Calgary to take them up on this.