Well, hopefully my last minute editorial decision to have Stephen Downes memorable quote about Brian Lamb’s presentation style read by a screen reader doesn’t get me off Stephen’s Christmas card list before I ever had the chance to get on. But it’s quite humbling to see your work noticed by folks like Stephen and Alan Levine who, along with other folks, have had really nice things to say about the Brian Lamb intro mashup I put together to introduce Brian’s keynote at Walls Optional, our annual in house Distributed Education conference. Thanks for all your comments. It was such a hoot to put together, and gave me a great excuse to dive into the collected/ive works of Brian Lamb.

I’ll have a proper post mortum about the event in a few days once I collect my thoughts, but suffice to say that the words coming back to us about Brian’s presentation have been words like “inspiring”, “eye opening”, “thought provoking” and “excellent”. It was all we could have hoped for and more in a keynote.

So, if you haven’t seen it, here is the intro that never was because, as fate would have it, technology intervened and it borked in front of the live studio audience. As Scott noted, it’s time to replace the 286’s on our rolling rack.

Just a couple days left before Walls Optional hits Camosun on Tuesday and I am trying to put a few finishing touches on my parts of the conference.

I’ve set up a video feed page on our site where we are going to try to capture the video live from CC124, which is where Brian Lamb will be delivering his keynote Tuesday morning.

Following Brian we’ve got Scott Leslie talking about the 2008 Horizon Report, Dominic Bergeron presenting on Student Created Content and Paul Stacey talking about Dare2bDigital. So, we should be giving our new Flash server a bit of a workout.

In addition, we’re going to try to capture some of the other events via webcams and portable MP3 players, so even if we can’t stream all the presentations live, we’re still hoping to create a decent resource site for after the conference.

Right now I’ve got 2 priorities left before Tuesday. Get my workshop on Netvibes put together and get over this cold. Isn’t that always the case – right before a big event is when the body is most likely to go “whoa, cool your jets buddy!”

Just wrapped up a planning meeting for our annual in house distributed education conference. Walls Optional: Promoting Excellence in Teaching and Learning through Technology is going to happen on May 6th at Camosun College. It’s a good opportunity for both our faculty and our department to showcase some of the work we have been doing in the past year, and setting the groundwork for the year to come.

I’m very happy that both Brian Lamb and Scott Leslie have agreed to present. The 2008 Horizon Project has caught the attention of some fairly high level administrators here, so it’s great to have someone like Scott here to speak directly to the report. And I’m very excited to meet Brian in person after having followed his work for the past few years.

I’ve got a space to present and am kicking around a couple of workshop ideas. Being more “Tech” than “Ed”, I’m leaning towards something hands on. I like the idea of doing a session on personal homepages and aggregation services (ala Netvibes or Pageflakes). Not only would many people find it useful to help organize their online life, but it would give me an opportunity to toss out a whole bunch of other technologies – blogs, RSS, podcasts, Flickr, widgets, delicious, and so on.

There is also a part of me that wants to do something around embed and how powerful and revolutionary I think that idea is.

But the session that will probably win out is the less than glamorous PowerPoint is Evil as a web content delivery tool. Judging from the number of PowerPoint presentations I see being posted online, I think this is something that will yield the biggest immediate bang for the buck. And I can still hang some Web 2.0 goodness onto this, showing off tools like Google Presentations and Slideshare.

So, if you were going to do a presentation to faculty about why they shouldn’t use PowerPoint on the web, what would you talk about? What alternatives are there to PowerPoint? Can you point me to any good resources? And, most importantly, should I use PowerPoint to do the presentation 🙂