We added a new member to the family, Madam Tiki. We thought Speedy our cat was getting a little bit lonely. So we went to The Pasadena Humane Society shelter and looked around and this little girl was sitting in a tattered little sweater being all quiet. I am not a small dog type of guy...but this one was cool. We figure that she is a Chiweenie: a Chihuahua and Dachshund cross, and some Dachshund-owning friends agree. She's basically a long, dark red-colored Chihuahua. We thought score, but there must be a long waitlist, but it turns out that she was brought in that day. A week later, she came home...Speedy was a little curious but no disasters yet.
January 30, 2009 – 2:54 pm
I have been playing with a new tool to create interactive fiction games. I was a big D&D fan, and played the Zork games and even the excellent Hitchhiker's Guide Infocom game. This was about 25 years ago when my parents had to wrench me off the computer to keep me away from those dark rooms with lanterns and rusty birdcages in the corner. I have fond memories of those days (I was 10 or so-ish) but more visual media has pulled me into the career I have now.
That is, until my grad school program pulled me back. There is this really great tool out there called Inform that lets you generate interactive fiction games such as the ones I described above, all without too much drama coding it. The code is very legible, no crazy variables or other things to worry to create a simple game. Read on for a sample, and my first game!
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December 30, 2008 – 2:52 pm
I had been meaning to throw up another update here but everything recently has been, as per my done-to-death saying, "all school-work and work-school." I just finished my second to last graduate course in the CTER program at UIUC, Analysis of Advanced Instructional Technologies. If you are interested, the final report is a pbWiki page and we posted our final project preso on Slide.com. We discussed the future of education. Our group tried to tackle the question from a developmental/occupational point of view, from K through higher ed. Comments are welcome.
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December 30, 2008 – 2:24 pm
2008 has probably been one of the toughest years in recent memory, personally and for the rest of the world at the same time. Lots of changes this year: new president, crappy economy, unexpected job changes for my wife. Everything got crazier this year, like life got turned up to 11...
Diana and I lost a good friend of ours over the summer. I haven't been able to really process it yet. Don was a great friend and a great guy who had so much strength.... This is a picture of the bench behind Jan and Don's old home in Kagel Canyon after the big fire in November. Jan came back into town and we checked out the property together. The fire raged all over the place, cooking their back yard, all except for the bench at which he had spent a lot of time looking out over the canyon. I logged some bench time with him there too. That's it I guess...if I can grasp any metaphor to attempt to encompass everything that has happened recently, I guess it would be this one. I just would like to sit at that bench again someday.
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November 23, 2008 – 2:47 pm
Found this on Educause Review via Alan Levine's blog (daily reading for me). It really is an excellent piece on how storytelling can evolve using web 2.0 technologies out there. I just posted the entry below, so I will link it up and let the experts speak for themselves.
Check it out: Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre by Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine.
November 15, 2008 – 2:43 pm
I wasn't originally going to post this, but after reading Rita's blog entry about her experience in our student-led conversations tonight I had to chime in. Rita commented:
"I truly feel that I interact with my classmates and instructors more often and on a more complex level than I ever have in a face to face environment. I think that our conversations are more carefully planned and thought provoking than face to face conversations. Take a moment to think about all of the times that you have left a conversation and thought “oh I should have said this” or “I wish I would have worded this more clearly, I should have said…”. In an online environment, you have time to construct those complex thoughts and you can always, easily, go back and review the conversations and revisit the conversation, and add to it."
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November 1, 2008 – 2:38 pm
YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvORKwmk9Xo
TeacherTube link: http://tinyurl.com/66o9hv
PDF transcript
Quicktime download (57.7 MB)
Following my previously posted rant about content, I spent the evenings at my journey to Educause 2008 working on another content project for school: an instructional video. Since I didn't have much to work with and I didn't have my own machine...only iMovie and Jing, though TechSmith offered to help and tried to sell me a copy of Camtasia Studio on the Educause expo floor. But I got away with a free Camtasia manual for the team at work: SCHWAG! So, I decided to make a video geared toward teachers and the first time ed-tech conference goer.
I have been to many conferences in my career, and I wish someone told me these things a while ago. Educause is especially big, busy, and intimidating the frist time around; but careful prep, comfy shoes, extra business cards, and a willingness to meet people go a long way to making the conference experience a good one.
Well, I finally graduated from my Masters program in Education, via CTER at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Forever an Illini now! I was a little disappointed that I couldn't make it into Illinois for my real-life graduation, but I decided to get dressed up anyway in OpenSim to celebrate.
