Friday, May 23, 2008

CW session A: Video presentations (the medium is the massage).

Two good workshops yesterday that I haven't blogged, and a lively town hall discussion this morning. More on that later, perhaps.

Session A started today with two video presentations, which interestingly is something I have been talking about with people the last few days. Rik Hunter's video of WoWwiki made interesting use of voice over, clips from a WoW event, and screen shots of scholarly articles.

Dan Anderson showed a flash-based video with a more direct video address to the audience, student samples (a collage assignment from a literature class primarily), video interviews with students, quotations worked in, and great information graphics. He articled a "flow zone" which I think many of us doing multimodal / electrate assignments are trying to help our students enter.

Alex Reid started with "I'm actually going to talk to you" which got a nice laugh, and he proceeded to deliver a visually and verbally compelling presentation about the transition from private to public spaces we are making (or are being forced to make). He encourages us to thinking about the "classrooms as ambient interfaces" (a quote from Byron Hawk). Wrapped up with Seesmic.com as a technology for making the private (conference presentation) public.

Great start, and the video presentations (perhaps) kept this session entirely on time. Q&A started at 10:57 am.