I’ve been using Obsidian as my note-taking app for a couple of years now. I’ve got over 5,000 notes for various things. Including lots of meetings. There are times when my job is basically going to meetings. And I need to be able to keep track of what we intend to talk about in each meeting (especially as they start to blur together).

Graph of over 5,000 notes in Obsidian. The red dots are mostly meetings. Blue are people, Orange-ish are Topics. Green are vendors.

⚙️ Work

We started the process of restructuring our team. The first step was the hardest thing I’ve had to do professionally. Now we get to move into the next phase for the team, and lots of exciting opportunities coming from that.

Also

I’m hiring - the posting to fill the Learning Technologies Specialist role for a 2-year limited term went up on Friday.

Also

While sharing the posting on shudder LinkedIn, I saw a video that was shared by UCalgary, showcasing Phong Vu and his family who own and operate Bake Chef. Which reminds me, I should plan to get a Bake Chef sub for lunch on Monday…

Thanks to a nudge from Alan, I jumped back into the 365photos project for 2022. I put together a quick video of the 365 photos - it’s kind of surprising just how much happened this year! I’ve been doing this project since 2007, but I’m not sure if I’ll keep it going in 2023.

The album for 2022 is available online (as well as albums for each year of the project). (the photo gallery script seems to be acting up. awesome. I’ll have to fix that when I have some time…)

I’d previously written a bit about shifting to more agile/adaptable/flexible learning technologies, and I’ve been meaning to write something about our work to adapt spaces in the Taylor Institute as we try to enable some kind of remote- or hybrid- or mixed- or whatever modality thing we wind up calling this stuff. So… here goes…

When everything shifted online at the beginning of the whole COVID thing, the learning spaces at the Taylor Institute kind of got put on hold for awhile. We focused on online platforms for a year, and then slowly started dipping back into hybrid scenarios where some students are physically in the room and some are elsewhere, wherever.

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I was going to make a GIF, but that turned into a file that was several times larger than the video…

I hadn’t ridden this route in almost 7 years. I’ve been trying to build up to it - it has some more-serious climbs than the routes I’ve been riding lately - but I made it. Not quite the slowest pace I’ve done on this route, but pretty close to it…

I’d forgotten how unfun it is to ride on 567. Thankfully, Lochend and Bearspaw are pretty decent to ride on, and it’s only a short segment on 567…

I realized that I can send emails from the back yard patio, so we fired it up to finish off a Monday afternoon:

A video is embedded here, but may not be displayed on a preview or if your browser does not support the video tag.

This amazing letter written by Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse, read by Benedict Cumberbatch.

Hesse was frustrated by a creative block and self-doubt¹. LeWitt would have none of it. I’ve had it on playing on loop.

Get out of your head. Just DOOOOOOO.

you are not responsible for the world. you’re only responsible for your work, so just. do. it.

(via BoingBoing)

I’ve been working on my thesis proposal, preparing for candidacy this summer. This explains why I’ve been pretty much silent here on the blog, and why I’ve been trying to reduce my social media time¹.

Much of my research will be on using the lens of video games as a way of describing classroom teaching - in fancy-talk, developing a model that adapts research methods developed for the formal analysis of video games to the description and analysis of teaching and classroom activities. I’ll be sharing much more about that over the next year as I get into data collection and writing the dissertation…

We’ve been getting questions from instructors who would like to use Zoom to conduct online exam proctoring, for up to 800 students. I mean. Golly. That’s just not a great idea. Aside from the philosophical issues involved with using a videoconferencing tool to surveil students during an exam, there are technical issues. How would 800 streams of video be recorded? How would that be viewed?

Also. The video feed isn’t necessary trustworthy. Not quite to the level of Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, but definitely something that shouldn’t be trusted 100%. Even if the software was able to fully lock out the feature, there’s nothing to prevent someone from using a doctored input as the source for their video. At the simplest level, here’s what’s possible directly within Zoom:

An article by Mehreen Kasana on Input Magazine made the rounds, talking about the “attention tracking” feature in Zoom, and how creepy and invasive it is.

It is. But it can also be disabled for any account - and if disabled for a campus account, it can also be locked out for all users.

One of the major projects our team¹ has been working on for the last couple of years is the University of Calgary’s Curriculum Links application.

From the project website overview:

It’s an application that supports curriculum design and review - an entire program can be designed before it’s submitted to a faculty for approval, allowing for pre-flight testing of the program. Do all of the claimed program-level outcomes get incorporated appropriately? Are there gaps? Redundancies? Is every course trying to teach one outcome, but none are teaching another one?

Some people¹ have asked me how Hugo works for publishing my site. It’s working great for my needs, and although it still needs some command-line work, it’s simple enough to learn it.

van Wermeskerken, M., Ravensbergen, S., & van Gog, T. (2018). Effects of instructor presence in video modeling examples on attention and learning. Computers in Human Behavior, 89, 430-438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.11.038

Does including a video that includes a view of the presenter add (through instructor presence) or detract (through distracting the viewer by forcing them to split attention)? This paper takes a look at a specific design pattern - an instructor presenting some content in a presentation - and uses eye tracking to observe where a viewer’s attention is focused during the video, and tries to assess the impact on learning (using pre/post test scores as a proxy). Is the a deeper connection through social response stronger than the “split attention effect” where viewers are automatically drawn to look at a human face rather than the content in a presentation? Does working memory¹ get messed up by having the instructor visible (but separate from the content)?

I took photos throughout my chemo/immunotherapy treatment, to document my reactions and the view from the poison room. Photos generates a decent slideshow (complete with Generic Copyright-takedown-avoiding Sountrack #1) ¹

I’ve been involved with edtech at my institution for… awhile. We’ve worked on many projects over the years, and one of the common problems has been related to authoring, publishing, and managing videos. It’s been left as an exercise to be solved by every individual, which has resulted in people publishing content in various platforms all over the internet.

Which is fine, until you realize that in doing so, they’re hosting university-related content for courses along with their dog videos and vacation videos and whatever else, in individual YouTube/Facebook/Vimeo accounts. And those platforms are injecting their own tracking and surveillance software to monitor who watches what and then connect it with their advertising platforms so you can be force-fed ads and algorithmic recommendations based on what you’ve watched ¹. And to vigorously defend the copyright claims of corporations by taking down legitimate academic content that legally contains clips of commercial media ².

This is pretty cool. Waaaay more high-end than what I’m thinking of, but passively turning a scene/event with multiple participants interacting in complex ways into a point cloud with nothing more than a bunch of cameras? Gold.

via BoingBoing

For my PhD research, I've been bouncing ideas around for how to volumetrically capture a performance or classroom session in 3D, and then layer on additional contextual data (interactions between participants, connections, info from dramaturgy, info from SoTL, etc.).

This NEBULA experimental jazz video by Marcin Nowrotek kind of gets at some of what's in my head. Imagine this, showing a group of students collaborating in an active learning session, and instead of notes/percussion visualizations, some kind of representation of how they are interacting etc… Also, since it's all in 3D, imagine being able to interact with the recording in 3D using fancy goggles.

We’re getting ready to roll out the new “Daylight” interface for D2L, which will go live on May 4, 2018. The biggest benefit is a responsive design, which will make the experience on mobile devices much, much better. And, it will also make it more usable through screen readers and other accessibility devices. Also, it’s very shiny.

I’ve given versions of this intro many times in committee meetings, and it’s time to have a quick video version so we can just email people a link. So, after spending a few minutes in our beautiful new audio booth, and a couple of hours messing around with Camtasia…

Dr. Märtensson's research formed much of the foundation of the plan for the Taylor Institute. Specifically, the macro/meso/micro layers within an organization, and working with each layer in various ways to draw people into the community. Her keynote at the 2017 University of Calgary Conference on Post-secondary Learning and Teaching was great, and nicely connected many of the threads of the conference.

This video is a great intro to our new College of Discovery, Creativity, and Innovation (CDCI), within the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. The Global Challenges course that was offered this year was an incredible and inspiring experience, where first-year students came together in an interdisciplinary research context to explore what it would take to feed 9 billion people.

via BoingBoing, this video of a presentation by Genevieve Bell from Intel at O’Reilly’s AI Conference, on how to engage the concept of AI from an anthropological and ethnographic framework.

I don’t think of AI as trying to invent an artificial human, but it’s extremely important to think about the cultural, moral, racial, and gender biases that get baked into code through histories of projects.

The forum in the Taylor Institute converts from a gymnasium-sized flat-floor active learning classroom into a 336-seat theatre for keynotes and special events.

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Paul asked about some of the quirks. Easier to show than tell… (based on the instructions linked here…)

A 15km ride from UofC to Deepest NW Calgary - only a couple of blocks worth of marked bicycle lanes, and a couple km of separated pathways. I used a helmet-mounted GoPro Hero 4 Silver set to shoot a 4K timelapse with frames recorded every second, played back at 30fps. Nice.

This video by Michael Wesch is fantastic. Thanks to Mike Caulfield for the link!

Empathy is a powerful thing. Big Data and analytics misses this aspect of teaching and learning.

Brendan Burchard’s D.U.M.B. goals, on trying not to get buried and lost in busy task-completion. He seems to be of the Tony Robbins / TED school, but, still, there’s something to this.

Dee Fink, giving the opening keynote presentation at the 2015 University of Calgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching. The theme of the 2015 conference is Design for Learning: Fostering Deep Learning, Engagement and Critical Thinking.

We hadn’t planned to record the keynote, but Dee asked us if we would, so we set something up that morning. The video is usable, but we’ll be producing higher quality recordings for future events…

Absolutely fantastic video project by a UCalgary business student. I love that a student can produce something like this as a personal/indie/small-scale project. Fast, cheap, out of control!

Episode 3 of Reclaiming Educational Technology, looking at the transition from monolithic vendor-provided enterprise solutions to more flexible and adaptive projects. Some of the segments are also used in episodes 1 and 2, but in order for this to work as a standalone piece, needed to be re-included here as well. When I do a longer supercut version, I’ll remove the duplicate clips.

Reclaiming Educational Technology - episode 3 from UCalgary Taylor Institute on Vimeo.

Episode 2 of Reclaiming Educational Technology, focusing on the DTLT unit at the University of Mary Washington, and how they are able to successfully foster a culture of innovation.

Reclaiming Educational Technology - fostering a culture of innovation from UCalgary Taylor Institute on Vimeo.

During the Reclaim Hackathon at UMW last week, several of us were talking over food and beverages and realized that we had the opportunity to document the current thinking in the “edtech scene”. It’s something that we hadn’t tried to do explicitly before, but we realized that if we don’t do it ourselves we’ll be left with the narratives pushed by the Big Business of Edtech Venture Capital™. So, David Kernohan and I took it on as a project. We recruited Andy Rush to record a series of impromptu interviews with some of the people who were present at the event¹, and off we went.

I did some googling (DuckDuckGoing? that’s not a thing yet, is it?) on Michael Betzler, who was the director on the previous skateboarding documentary. Looks like he now is/was director at the olympic media consortium. Before that, he was involved in this bit of awesomeness.

I would have been the same age as my son is now, when this footage was shot. Wow. My dad had his insurance agency in the Lougheed Building downtown, so I would have been down there pretty regularly. Amazing, how much the city has changed in just a handful of decades…

This documentary is awesome.

So many 1986.

I picked up a Swivl robot camera mount to kick off our “tech lending library” here in the EDU. It’s a pretty interesting piece of kit that will let anyone record a session without having to spend $100K retrofitting a classroom with PTZ cameras and switching boards. Slap this thing onto a desk or tripod, drop your iPhone (or iPad, or Android device) into the slot, plug the microphone cable into the mic jack on your device, and hit record. Done. It now automatically tracks the lanyard, which also has a built-in microphone that sends decent audio to the recording device. Nice.

C.G.P. Grey posted this fantastic video on the inevitability of automation, and what it might mean for society at large.

We think of technological change as the fancy new expensive stuff, but the real change comes from last decade's stuff getting cheaper and faster. That's what's happening to robots now. And because their mechanical minds are capable of decision making they are out-competing humans for jobs in a way no pure mechanical muscle ever could.

Read More

You are not a storyteller - Stefan Sagmeister @ FITC from FITC on Vimeo.

via Tyler Hellard

Looks like CAMP Festival would be pretty interesting.

If I ever spew anything like this, kill me.

Just processed a quick time-lapse test, using the camera ¹ that we installed to monitor construction of the new digs. This’ll work nicely… Now, to test a few video hosting platforms, to see which one mangles the video the least…

** YouTube version: **

MediaCore version:

I love this so much. People for Good. We are who we choose to be.

Audrey Watters and Jim Groom were at the MIT Media Lab with Philipp Schmidt and others for a hackathon. Sounds like it was a pretty incredible couple of days.

The video below captures some of the discussion. So much goodness in it. We haven’t lost the open web. We can (continue to) choose to build it. Yes, there are silos and commodifcation and icky corporate stuff that would be easy to rail against, but what if we just let go of that and (continue to) build the web we want and need? Yeah. Let’s (continue to) do that… That’s what Boone’s Project Reclaim is all about. That’s what I do on a tiny, insignificant, human scale. That’s why I publish my own stuff here - I’ve built this site up exactly how I want it, to support my ability to be as open as I choose, without relying on others to enable (or decide not to) me.

the City of Calgary Route Ahead project's twitter feed just posted a link to this awesome timelapse of a C-Train ride from the far northwest terminal (near my house), past my office (right before the first tunnel), through downtown, and then to the Deep South. I love me some HD timelapse train videos...

John sent this around. It's too awesome not to post.

yeah. my commute isn't quite like that…

but, with all of the awesome trick riding in the video, I was most stunned by the application of WD-40 at the end of the video. I mean, WHO DOES THAT? It's a solvent. No est bueno!

I don't have the stones to try this kind of riding, but damn does it look fun...

Graham Agassiz's New Zealand Adventure on Pinkbike

After some ranting on Twitter about the latest mindless inanity from my illustrious Member of Parliament, Matt Henderson mentioned that he ran for MP in the last election, with his high school class running his campaign.

How awesome is that? Pretty fracking awesome.

I've been messing around with hosting my own videos, but that's one area where the third party services have the functionality nailed. They magically transcode video file formats. They create thumbnails. They provided embeds to make it easy to use the video. But, Jim posted about how he's having to take on some copyfighting, because YouTube is bending over for some pretty outrageous false copyright claims. The only way to prevent a third party from misusing your content is to not use a third party.

Jim Groom, at TEDxNYC¹, on apocalypse/zombie/crisis narratives, and communities creating together.

great video on city biking, by kona bikes (who made the bike that really got me back into biking big time )

so good. ride a bike. polar bears are epic.

The tech vision video for project glass was released today. The technology looks interesting, if a bit creepy.

But what hits me is that this isn’t about augmenting your reality. It’s about augmenting google’s documentation of everything you do, so they can mine it to sell to advertisers. The implications of a service actively monitoring and interacting and documenting and monetizing everything I do and say are just mind boggling.

a vintage 1965 cycling film from the NFB. awesome.

I just found this Holstee Manifesto Lifecycle video. So good.

The Holstee Manifesto Lifecycle Video from Holstee on Vimeo.

so go out and start creating.

life is short.

THE MAN WHO LIVED ON HIS BIKE from Guillaume Blanchet on Vimeo.

so good. I need to ride hands-free more. Haven’t really done that since I was a kid…

via a tweet from Momentum Magazine:

The Man Who Lived on His #Bike shar.es/fher2

— Momentum Magazine (@MomentumMag) February 2, 2012

Good video, put out by the City. I get cut off by motorists turning right on a regular basis.

They've got a whole series of them - now, to get motorists watching them…

Evan's school is working on a schoolyard naturalization project, with [support from the Calgary Zoo](http://www.calgaryzoo.org/schoolyard_naturalization/) and money raised by parents and grants. The Zoo recently shot a promotional video, and included our school as the representative of the "planning stage". Evan's visible in a blur of blue on one shot. We're working to restore the school's land from graded-field status to something more natural and useful for education. The kids are pretty excited by the whole process.

or, the post where I realize I’ve reduced my blog to simply reposting the awesome stuff from Jason Kottke’s blog.

whatever. this video is mesmerizing. I hope the dude can hold his breath…

Bombie@1000fps from Chris Bryan on Vimeo.

The video was shot by Chris Bryan at 1000 frames per second. In HD. With some really fancy schmancy video gear, and what looks like a verrrrry long lens.

I was sitting on the deck after getting home, cooling down from the bike ride, and was struck by the awesome fast-moving whispy clouds overhead. Had an idea to try to shoot the motion, and shot 15 minutes of video with my phone. I then recorded a few minutes of atmospheric guitar noise, and spent far too long convincing iMovie to do something with the video, and then even longer convincing my internet connection to upload it to YouTube. Anyway, here it is…

An awesome video/ad by the great Camera Store in Calgary. These guys take photography pretty seriously.

Midway Journey

Yes please, Calgary.

(via PlanetBike’s twitter feed)

In the spirit of sharing process, ala Cogdog, here’s how I did it. It’s pretty complicated.

This video was shot in one take (no script, just kinda winging it), using my iPhone4 as video camera, resting on a plastic stand on my desk in the basement. To do this, I pressed the “record” button on the phone. The video was brought into iMovie ‘09, via the magical wondrousness of a USB cable, and some photos were dragged over from Aperture (I used a trackpad for this, but any pointing device supported by MacOSX would likely suffice). Export the file as HD movie, and upload to teh youtuber, slowly, via the fugly web interface.

a series of composite images, produced from my 2010/365photos daily photo project. Each month was composited separately, and then a composite for the entire year was produced from the monthlies.

There’s a lower quality version on Vimeo but it’s been recompressed, so sucks a bit more.

Update: Now with an attempt at full html5 compatibility - MP4, OGV and WEBM formats. Yay!

This video, via PlanetBike, of bicycle riders in Copenhagen makes my head spin a little. Sooo many bikes, and no Hummers trying to flatten them.

What strikes me, after the sheer number of cyclists, and how they all move so wonderfully together, is that the people riding the bikes are just regular people. No hardcore spandex mercenary riders on carbon fiber racing bikes. No mountain bikes bopping all over the place. Normal people. Riding utility bikes. And lots of them.

car culture is awesome, and so completely enriching to society as a whole.

via @bikebikeYYC

Whenever I’m in Vancouver (which, frankly, is nowhere near often enough), I’m struck by how many people ride their bikes to get around the city. Honestly, I think I’m amazed enough that I bore anyone within earshot with constant comments about bikes, people riding bikes, and infrastructure to enable bicycle riding.

In Calgary, it feels like riding a bike is definitely a fringe or freak activity. In Vancouver, it feels like just another way to get around. I hope someday Calgary can get to this level of bike activity.

Riding from Edinburgh to Dunvegan. I could watch Danny ride all day.

(via Jason Kottke, via Matt Haughey )

I wonder if I can retrofit my current bike with handlebar flamethrowers…

The next few years in Calgary are going to be very interesting. And by interesting, I mean awesome.

[The Johnny Cash Project](http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com) took the final studio recording made by The Man In Black, and had people contribute hand-drawn frames from a video shot for it, to be compiled into a fan-art video.

Through the Contribute section of the website, you are given 3 frames from the video, and some tools to draw your own version of them.

Your drawing(s) are then sent into the pool of available images for the appropriate frames of the video, and can be displayed in the final composition. Drawings can be voted up, or curated by the director.
It's an interesting way to enable multiple submissions for a time-based presentation.

More awesomeness at the It Gets Better Project

I mentioned on Twitter that I still suck pretty badly at playing my guitar. Scott suggested that I only need to know 2 chords. 2? hah! I know 4! So, Alan pointed out that all you NEED is 4 chords.

If the 4 chords I know are the right 4 chords, I may be ready to start touring. Except for the rest of the whole I-still-suck-at-playing thing. But at least I’m having fun :-)

After being mesmerized by the film shot from a streetcar along Market Street in San Francisco before The Big One, here’s some footage shot shortly after the earthquake and fire that devastated the city. Via Jason Kottke, who Viad devour.

I’m guilty of a few of these ridiculous car trips - driving the 1.5km to the local grocery store when I don’t feel like schlepping there on the bike. I’m going to try cutting that down a bit…

via a tweet from Clarence Fisher, this interesting documentary on data visualization and journalism. I’m wondering how the concepts translate into other fields…

François Vautier stuck an ant colony inside his scanner, and watched it grow for 5 years. The result is a fascinating hybrid of organic biological growth, and rigid, cold technology.

via Daring Fireball comes this video by Kirby Ferguson. Remixing isn’t new, and attribution is a shifting thing.

Everything is a Remix from kirby1 on Vimeo.

via Jason Kottke’s fantastic blog, this great, intimate video by Andrea Dorfman and Tanya Davis, on being alone.

Bruce Schneier speaks at the 2010 EWI Cybersecurity Summit.

Granular explicit control over privacy is unnatural…

Electronic commerce produces data. Everything we do produces data. (in ways traditional cash-based commerce did not)

Businesses and governments are forcibly changing social norms. Who gets to make the rules?

We are not Google’s customer. We are actually Google’s product, that they sell to their customer.

Data is the pollution problem of the 21st century.

I just found this introduction to eLearning and blended learning video, produced by the United Nations University Vice Rectorate in Europe (UNU-ViE). It’s very basic, but that’s the point of the video. Could come in handy in talking with faculty members - sometimes they have interesting concepts of what eLearning is (and isn’t)…

Sticky Concepts on E-learning from UNU-ViE on Vimeo.

A fascinating short experimental film, showing the flight patterns of insects through long exposure photography. An interesting way to visualize activity.

I just stumbled across this fascinating experimental film, looking at urban activities from the perspective of the surfaces we have contact with.

The kinds of social policies [described by Google's CEO](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_ceo_schmidt_people_arent_ready_for_the_tech.php) haven't worked out very well in the past.

I could watch this video all day. The fluid, organic flow of people and machines [through the streets of San Francisco in 1905](http://www.archive.org/details/TripDown1905) - before the big fire. There's something mesmerizing about the way everyone is able to move together. No ring roads. No interchanges. No streetlights. No bike lanes. Just a fluid, organic flow of humanity. I lost count of near-miss collisions, though...

**Update:** Looks like the video got yanked from YouTube due to copyright issues on the audio. Awesome. So, here's the version direct from the Prelinger Archives:

Not sure if it's actual "truth" (or is it just truthiness?) but this is a pretty interesting animation/presentation by TheRSA.org and Cognitive Media on motivation in the workplace, and what drives innovation. It probably won't display in the RSS feed, so here's a direct link.

I took the long route home, heading down to the river, then climbing my way back up. It adds a little more to the elevation change over the ride, but packs a bunch of it into the last few KM, making for much steeper climbing than my normal route. Great workout, and it's on the ride home. Here's a quick video shot during the ride (won't work in RSS, of course...)

Dave Cormier created a masterpiece work of art to document one of the lesser known sides of Northern Voice - that a small percentage of attendees seem to have the tendency to check in with The Internet from handheld devices. I was glad to provide the anthropological fodder for this deeply compelling piece. Thank Xenu, it's only 6 seconds long...

I slapped the Flip video camera onto the bike for this morning’s ride. Here’s the 43 minute ride, compressed into 5 minutes of video.

2009/365photos from D’Arcy Norman on Vimeo.

direct link to the video, for RSSites.

How do you connect to people online? from D’Arcy Norman on Vimeo.

(Link to video, for the RSS folks)

I had to cut back on the scope quite a bit to keep it to a 15 minute length. This could have easily turned into an epic documentary… Lots of very difficult decisions.

If you haven't watched Lessig's fantastic, passionate keynote yet, watch it.

(link to the video, in case it gets stripped from the RSS)

It's worth it, if for no other reason than to get your own Certificate of Entitlement, signed by Lawrence Lessig:

I was asked to share how I got that Bike Blur photo yesterday. It's really simple, once you know a couple of tricks.

I lugged my camera and Flip on the Ride to Conquer Cancer, to document some of the ride. It was a pretty epic bike ride - the hardest thing I've ever done - but was well worth it.

Thank you to everyone that supported me in any way - it definitely made the pain of the ride easier to push through.

Full resolution photos are available on Flickr, and I apologize for my severe lack of video production skills...

I've been farting around with a Manfrotto Super Clamp to attach a camera to my bike to experiment with techniques to document the Ride to Conquer Cancer. I've got a bunch of stuff to try, but I'm getting closer to something that I'm happy with.

Here's the first half of my ride home from UCalgary campus through the streets of NW Calgary - sped up about 3x. I was averaging between 30-40km/h for this portion of the ride.

Inspired by this commute video I saw this morning, I was curious what it would look like if I recorded my full commute. I’ve tried it before with a helmet cam, but hadn’t tried it with a fixed quasi-steady camera.

I took my cheap little Flip Ultra video camera, stuck it on the rear rack of my bike, and fastened it in place with a pair of bungee cords. It wasn’t ideal, but should have been good enough, as long as I didn’t wipe out or hit anything big.

The Reverend just posted a link to a great video produced by EDUCAUSE, which is basically a discussion between Jim Groom and Gardner Campbell on edupunk. It’s well worth viewing. I’m going to be passing it around here on campus.

[qt:https://darcynorman.net/video/2008_366.m4v https://darcynorman.net/video/2008_366.mov.jpg 640 360]

click the image above, or, if you don't want the embedded QuickTime version, there's the slideshow on Flickr.

The 2008 366photos photo a day project wrapped up last night. I don't have anything deep or profound to say about it, other than I'm really glad Alan talked me into doing a second year (after doing 2007/365 the year before). I didn't think I'd be able to do it, but it's been fun. It's been hard - I knew it would be, but there were a few times where I almost dropped the project. It's been surprisingly rewarding. And it's been inspiring, watching the other people who have taken on the project for the year.

I missed this when it was released because I was offline someplace warm.

I had the distinct pleasure of introducing Dr. Leslie Reid this morning, for her presentation "Creating Team Projects that Work in Large Classes: Redesigning a Large Science 'Service' Course" - part of the Teaching & Learning Centre's 10th anniversary series of presentations. She talks about her experience in redesigning a large class (300 students with 13 weeks of lectures) into a format based on group projects (250 students with 6 weeks of lectures and 6 weeks of group work).

Evan got a remote controlled monster pickup truck for his birthday. The first thing we did with it was strap on the Flip Ultra video camera and take it for a drive (bungee corded onto the bed of the pickup - after removing the plastic "roll cage" it ships with). Having no compulsions about high quality video production, or high definition video quality, is a very liberating and fun place to be :-)

Some off the cuff (on the bike) rambling about some thoughts about what open education is - open content, open access and open accreditation. This is hopefully rock bottom with respect to video production quality - but at least you get to come along for some of my ride home...

A follow-up on my last rant on openness in universities, wherin I improperly aim the camera and showcase my multitude of chin-related tissue.

I stopped to record a quick stream-of-thought rant about openness and the institution. My opinions are my own, not my employers, etc... Please don't fire me.

And, yes, I know that I said "thousands of years" - I meant "hundreds..." or "a long time". Whatever.

Alec posted a link to this a few days ago, and I finally got around to watching the video. It’s Professor Michael Wesch’s presentation to the Library of Congress, where he talked about the anthropological effects he observed after producing his awesome video essay The Machine is Us/ing Us.

The presentation is a fantastic, rich, and deep investigation into the connections and their effects on communication and media. Free up 55 minutes and watch the whole thing.

I picked up a Flip Ultra video camera this weekend, and one of the things I wanted to try was strapping it to my bike helmet to record my morning commute, just to see what it looked like. So, I dorked myself up a bit by attaching the Flip to my helmet via a handy dandy bungee cord, and recorded the morning ride. It’s a bit stomach-churning in spots, because of head motion swinging the camera all over the place, but it’s pretty close to being there…

Sounds cool, but is the 90 second limit real?

Flickr's official stance on the time limit is this:

Video on Flickr grew out of the idea of "long photos" and as such, we've implemented what might seem like an arbitrary limit of playing back the first 90 seconds of a video. 90 seconds?

We're not trying to limit your artistic freedom, we're trying something new. Everyone has endured that wedding video, where even the bride will fast-forward to the "good bit." In fact, even Tara at FlickrHQ hasn't made it past the first 90 seconds of her own wedding video.

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I'm going to be showing some videos to faculty members who have participated in our Inquiry Through Blended Learning program. I get 20-30 minutes, during a wrap-up lunch on Friday. But I'm stumped. I could easily just show a TED talk (or two, if edited for time) but... what you YOU show, considering the audience is made up of faculty members from a wide range of disciplines, but are brought together by a common interest in inquiry and blended learning?

Bike more, drive less. And parties ensue…

I'm preparing a series of screencasts as part of the session at the Open Education 2007 Conference (with my co-conspirator, Rev. Jim Groom). We're doing a two-fold presentation.

1. Creation of an open education resource on early American history.
2. Documentation of the processes used to build said resource, using freely available applications and services.

We gave ourselves a very simple constraint. Use only tools that don't require access to a server, and don't require any money. The idea being that we would be able to come up with a process that didn't require a great deal of technical skillz, and wouldn't require a budget to implement.

This BikeCam slideshow is the other way, both in direction and technique. I stuck the camera on the handlebars for the ride home, and used QuickTime Pro's "Open Image Sequence..." feature to build a movie at 2fps automagically. That took maybe 5 minutes, including the resized export of all images from Aperture. That was muuuuch easier/quicker than the way I built the last one (using iMovie - that was pretty easy, but this was just pointing QuickTime at a directory and exporting the result). Easy peasy.

This morning, I strapped a camera to my handlebars, and took 106 shots during the 30-minute morning commute. Here's the outcome:

[flv:https://darcynorman.net/video/BikeCam_480_270.flv 480 270]

Soundtrack: Pedal Pushing, by MC Abdominal

Here’s the presentation, with the clips and selections Brian and I used during the welcoming reception for the Canadian eLearning 2007 conference on Tuesday. I wound up not recording audio during the presentation, so you’ll just have to imagine witty and entertaining banter and intros for each video. Brian was responsible for both the witty and entertaining portions of the presentation.

The video selections came to 48 minutes. We were given a 45 minute slot after the welcome reception supper meal. You do the math…

Here's the playlist Brian and I used for our presentation during the Canadian eLearning 2007 conference welcome reception on Tuesday evening. I'll try to compress a version of the presentation with our clip selections (we only showed short clips from many of the videos) but I won't get a chance to do that until the weekend.

intro

1. who the hell are we, and what the hell are we doing there?
2. Brief riff on new abundance of online video and DIY creativity in era of YouTube
3. Intro clip of Guy Caballero, followed by SCTV's Hinterland Who's Who, followed by the Crack Spider version.
4. Overview of Online video awards

changing nature of education

1. Ken Robinson - TED Talks 2004
2. Spare Me My Life! Cultural values implicit in instruction

web 2.0

1. Doug Engelbart- The Demo
2. Apple's Knowledge Navigator Video
3. Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
4. 2014 EPIC, by Google
5. Le Grand Content - information visualization

Hallucinatory Interlude:

1. Safe tripping...

creative commons and open content

1. Creative Commons - Wanna Work Together?
2. A Fair(y) Use Tale
3. The Future is Open

mashups

1. Rick Noblenski- Blasting Caps Expert and Wiki Advocate - an edu. reuse of old content
2. Winnie the Pooh meets Apocalypse Now
3. The Shining Recut
4. Monty Trek
5. Instructional Video: Mash-up made from instructional videos

I had a total blast hanging out working with Brian for the Canadian eLearning 2007 conference welcome reception entertainment gig we got coerced invited to do. Here's the clip we put together as the intro segment for our Online Video Party redux, based on being in the spiritual home of the most inspired group of video comedians ever assembled: SCTV!

[flv:https://darcynorman.net/video/LiveFromDeadmonton2_320x240.flv 320 240]

That was re-edited and audio dubbed in a cookie-cutter "pub" in "Bourbon Street" at West Edmonton Mall. We could tell we were in "Bourbon Street" because of the authentic Celine Dion and Bryan Adams soundtrack, and the always impressive New Orleans wide selection of only the finest alcohols - Coors, Coors Lite, Bud and Bud Lite.

I had the pleasure of co-presenting a session with Brian, Alan and Jim for the MacLearningEnvironments.org group. We wound up breathing some new life into Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and building some demo sites and background wiki pages. Here's the video for the session:

The video is available in iPod format, and original lossless QuickTime format. Brian is also offering up an audio-only MP3 version of the jam session.

We got back into Calgary early this morning (possibly the last flight to land at YYC for the night). Maui is great. A little more developed than I'd have liked (CostCo™ and Wal-Mart™ don't fit into my ideal mental image of relaxing tropical islands) but we had a blast nonetheless. Photos are now on Flickr, and I will try to do a braindump about the trip so I don't forget the details.

I’d been hoping to refrain from blogging this, since everyone with a blog has already posted it. But, I’ve been emailing and IM it so much that it’s just going to be easier to drop a reference to it here.

Without a doubt, the simplest, cleanest, most interesting demonstration of the meaning of Web2.0 I’ve seen. None of that old school powerpoint and slideware. This is more like “5 minutes in the life of Web 2.0”

Jeff Han gave a presentation at last year's TED conference, showing his tactile interface system. Forget mice and keyboards. This is a less-creepy version of Minority Report. Or Star Trek's LCARS interface.

I've watched it 3 times today. I want my next computer to work like this. How about a 30" Cinema Display that tilts backward to become a tabletop surface with tactile interface...

Dreamhost rocks. I mean, they just keep piling on awesome new features into their hosting package. Recently, it was essentially infinite bandwidth and storage. Yesterday, they added an automatic Flash video transcoder and presenter, ala YouTube. But, within any Dreamhost site.

All I have to do is upload a video file (.avi, .mov, .mp4) to my site, tell Dreamhost I want it converted to Flash video (using the panel.dreamhost.com site that's used for managing everything else as well), and their magic elves do their work and email me a javascript snippet to embed a flash player in any web page (or blog post). Like, for instance, this one:

I've been following the TED Talks videos as they're published - recordings of the various presentations at the 2006 TED Conference/Symposium. There are some absolutely amazing presentations, ranging from Al Gore, to Nicholas Negroponte, to Mena Trott (and many others).

TED Talks in iTunes

The video production and publication is sponsored by BMW, who are hoping to be associated with the innovation and Deep Thinking presented at TED, and I think it's a great example of how online advertising can work.

Dabble was just pushed into full public mode, after being in a beta (does anything ever really leave beta?).

Looks like a pretty cool site - the main goal appears to be a social network growing around videos published around the internets.

It is a pretty thorough implementation, completely done in Drupal. It looks like it's pretty heavily depending on a few modules in addition to the core (namely, video, playlist, tagadelic, buddylist(?), and likely a few others). The theme looks like a complete custom job, and the only thing that tipped me off was the use of "node" in some urls. Digging deeper, I found the telltale drupal.css file on the server (but not used in the theme...)

This summer, at the NMC 2005 Summer Conference, they shot a bunch of video with interviews of some of the attendees, and some highlights of the conference. The video was distributed via DVD to the campus NMC rep - which is/was me. Instead of duplicating the DVD, or managing some form of sign in/out process, here's the video. It was a quick-and-dirty rip of the DVD using Handbrake, so no bonus points for the art of video compression... The video is only 9 minutes long, so it's not a big time investment.

Well, the One More Thing event turned out to be pretty spiffy. Cool new iMac. Some funky new software (but is it iMac-only?) The new video iPod looks sweet - and the high end one still costs less than my 3G 20GB unit did...

The TV-on-iTunes/iPod thing looks like it will be awesome. But... Where is Battlestar Galactica? I'd subscribe to the whole season of that. I will likely buy the rest of this season of Lost, as well - or at least the ones I miss "live". But, BSG? Every. Single. Episode.