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.
Keynote
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