Featured Speaker: 06/10/2009: Alumni Association Conference

This morning I talked to a large group of Alumni Association staff about ideas related to connecting communities.  The talk was titled, Emerging Trends for Connecting Communities, and focused on the emergent opportunities within social environments, content creation spaces, and with the rise of mobility.  It is always quite a bit of fun getting to talk to people outside my specific area of focus and I always discover that we have far more in common than I expect going in.

Keynote: 04/29/2009: Annual One to One Computing Conference

I have once again been asked to participate as a keynote for the 2009 Annual One to One Computing Conference to be held April 27-29 here at Penn State. I have been involved the last three years, keynoting two years ago, and participating in an informal conversation last year. It is always a great time! My good friends Kyle Peck and Catherine Augustine make this amazing event happen and I am honored to be a part of it once again.
This year I did a talk titled, "If that's scholarship then we are all doomed."
I enjoyed this very much. Great questions from the audience and I found that we are all dealing with the same set of issues for the most part. David Warlick was there and wrote an overview of the session.
Download a PDF of my Slides.

Keynote: 03/27/2009: Penn State Harrisburg

I've been invited to keynote the instructional technology event at Penn State Harrisburg on March 27th.  It sounds like a good event to spread awareness of the things we are promoting for teaching and learning with technology at Penn State.  I'll share thoughts on how students are participating in emerging online spaces and thoughts on how we should work together to meet them there.  I'll post slides and follow up notes after the event.

1/9/2008: Keynote Presentation: Maricopa Mesa Community College

On January 9th, 2008 I will be giving a keynote talk I am titling, Building a Platform for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. I was an invited featured speaker at Maricopa's Teaching and Learning with Technology conference this past year and have been invited back to open one of their events this year. I am really looking forward to it! Below is the description for my talk.
During this talk we will discuss strategies for realistically achieving innovation in teaching and learning by understanding your environment, leveraging existing infrastructure, and tapping the power of your community. We’ll explore how Penn State University has worked to utilize existing tools to create new opportunities and achieve an IT culture based on agility and with an eye towards innovation. One of the other things we will look at is the ETS Engagement Process and our Hot Teams approach. I've included a PDF of the Engagement Process here as well.
Download PDF of the Slides

1/8/2008: Keynote: Maricopa Gateway Community College

On January 8th, 2008 I will be giving a keynote talk I am titling, Enabling the New Classroom Conversation. I am heading back to the Maricopa system where I did a similar talk last year.
During this talk we will investigate three key trends impacting educators in their overall design of learning. Focusing on the emergence of user-created content, social spaces, and mobile devices we will take an integrated look at how we can better utilize technology within these areas to meet the needs of the net-generation. We will also explore how these technologies have, and continue to, impact both faculty and learners and review some active examples within each area. During this talk, we will focus attention on how educators can leverage technology to shape learning outcomes in new ways.

Some Thoughts for Apple and Keynote

I am an avid Keynote user and have been since it first hit the market. I love how clean and elegant not only the design tools are, but also the resulting presentation files. Let me also say that I use it a ton. A big part of my job is sharing progress, giving updates, giving presentations, and all sorts of other show and tell style events. This means I have lots of Keynote files — I tend to have four or five that I use constantly for a year or so at a time. I tweak them with each talk slightly for the audience, but for the most part 90% of the slides stay the same. When I do this I do a “Save As” and create a new instance of the slides. This results in lots of very similar, yet slightly different versions of my slides … This drives me crazy!

What I am really after is something that is just like Keynote, but with the cross-over functionality of iPhoto. iPhoto’s new “Events” feature is killer. Why not allow us to store stacks of like slides (not presentations) as Events (or something) in a completely different view of the application — a content management view. Let me organize each slide as an asset unto itself. I could then use an “photo album” metaphor to drag individual slides onto the presentation stack (or timeline, or whatever) to create new slideshows. Giving me the ability to manage all my slides as assets, just like Apple does for iPhoto, iTunes, and now iMovie, would give me unprecedented control over my content.

So to review, what I want is Keynote as it stands today, but with a new content management view that lets me store all my keynote slides and slideshows in one place. I don’t care how the individual slides are stored, but the whole way you can scrub through the events in iPhoto to see the contents of that grouping would be ideal for slides that have very similar information, but might have been changed slightly with context sensitive information. I would then be able to click into that slide event grouping, select the right one for the presentation I was preparing and drop it into a Presentation Stack that I could enter to edit my preso just like I do now. And give me some real ability to store some meta data about each slide so I can search this massive database of content I am constantly creating and tweaking.

Does that make sense? It does to me and I need it!

6/18/07: Keynote Talk: Third Annual One-to-One Computing Conference

On June 18, 2007 I will be delivering a keynote talk to the participants on the Third Annual One-to-One Computing Conference. This annual event is held at Penn State University on the University Park campus. I am looking forward to this as it is an opportunity to talk with a whole new audience — mainly K-12 teachers. I will be talking about how we can leverage emerging technologies in the classroom to help extend the conversation. I am looking forward to the event and to the opportunity. Another big reason I am very excited is that the Father of the conference is Kyle Peck and many of my good friends in the College of Education have had a big hand in its overall success.
Link to presentation. Download the PDF