Adobe Education Leaders

A colleague of mine at school became stressed out about a project. She is volunteering for our School Counselor Association, working with a group of college/university professors on a publication project. She was going to meet with them during one of her work days far from our home town. She got behind at work and become extremely stressed out about leaving her family and students for almost two days across the state. She observed my strategies of getting up early in the morning, doing an Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro Meeting session from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. with my own colleagues before my work day. Then a light came on for her, she came to me and asked for help with her situation. I asked her what problem she was trying to solve. She explained how she was in charge of collecting information on each section of the publication the higher education teachers where producing to explain their admission process. Each section of the publication needed to be analyzed by the group and edited for revision. I emailed her an Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro Meeting Room URL and told her to send it out for an online meeting. I decided to help solve her challenge by creating multiple chat rooms labeled with the same headings found in the admissions publication. Each chat room was a bucket ready to be filled with the recommended revisions from the higher education group. I turned on the "Presenter Only Area" within Connect Pro and staged each chat room off to the side, ready to be dragged over into the "Participant Viewing Area." The meeting began, all of the professors were impressed how organized she was by dragging each chat room over into their view. They would fill the chat room with their recommended revisions for each section, and then she would drag it off and drag the new one into view. This process went on for about an hour. At the end of the meeting, all of the professors and my friend were back at their jobs, in their geographic locations, working with students and not missing hours of work time. Finally, she just needed to copy and paste each section from the chat rooms and dump the information into a Word Document to send to the publisher. Once again, the technology of Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro came to the rescue.

With all the nonsense being put out in some circles placing HTML5 and Flash content at odds with one another atop highly exaggerated claims that HTML would "replace" or "phase-out" Flash within the next few years (what?), it might be heartening for those students looking to work in the field of RIA to know exactly where they stand with current job trends.

I was alerted to a recent study of indeed.com data made by Jonathan Campos that I believe should give future graduates a more solid outlook if they've been at all rattled by the recent debates.

Some of the highlights are revealed in the following charts (keep in mind that July 2009 is probably the height of the current global recession):

We can see from the graph above that Flex is still the leading RIA technology. Sure, Dojo (representing the HTML/JavaScript area of RIA) is doing nicely as well- but HTML/JavaScript and Flash are complementary technologies and in no way supplant one another aside from their specific strengths and weaknesses.

Happily, we see here that practitioners of RIA technologies still get paid nicely for their work.

Students- you have nothing to worry about. Don't let the trolls frighten you!

Recently an intrepid group of teachers in Palm Beach County undertook a remarkable journey--a 6 day canoe expedition through the northern reaches of the Florida Everglades. Sponsored by a local environmental group, the Arthur Marshall Foundation, these teachers and their guides paddled from the north shore of Lake Okeechobee to the Grassy Waters Nature Preserve in West Palm Beach as a means to draw attention to the ongoing battle to preserve the natural areas that once predominated in South Florida, but that have been lost to development and agriculture.

As fascinating as the trip was, the teachers were able to interact with their students and with others around our school district while in the Everglades. Armed only with an inexpensive netbook computer, a wireless cellular aircard, and an Adobe Connect virtual classroom, the teachers spoke with their students each morning and answered their questions--making the experience one that hundreds of students could share and one that took the idea of a teachable moment to whole new levels.

In the 6 minute video below the teachers and students relate what the experience was like for them, and once again demonstrate how powerful technology can be when placed in the hands of talented educators.

The University of Denver Center for Teaching and Learning is holding a conference this Friday the 29th on "Education and New Media". We are going to be streaming two keynotes by Michael Wesch live via Flash Media Server and invite you all to attend the discussion through a special app built for the conference that incorporates the live FMS stream, conference Twitter feed, and Google Analytics.

Remote participants can log in and post to the feed via the app - built entirely in Flash:

The idea behind this app is that conference participants (and those from afar who have interest in the keynotes) will be able to participate in a collaborative conversation through the Twitter feed while watching the keynote all through a single interface.

To accomplish this, I've employed Sandro Ducceschi's very cool Tweetr AS3 Library for interfacing with the Twitter API. This is employed for both pulling all tweets marked with "#CTL2010" and allowing users to authenticate into Twitter and post directly from the app. The feed is refreshed every 60 seconds.

On the video side of things, we have employed the university's Flash Media Servers and are tracking stats via Google Analytics Event Tracking API (which I have previously presented about for FITC). This results in a really nice (and functional!) showcase piece for using new media through the integration of a variety of systems and services.

To tie it all together, we're using the open source Flex 4 framework and have made heavy use of the new Spark component set. The open source Text Layout Framework is used to render tweets along with my TwitterString class to interpret links, hashtags, and usernames.

I invite everyone to please spread the word about the conference stream. We'd like to have as many people participate in the discussion as possible!

Information about the conference follows:

The University of Denver is hosting an Education and New Media conference on Friday, January 29, 2010. We are very excited to have Michael Wesch as our keynote speaker. You are invited to join us for his keynote sessions via a live video stream. Virtual participants will have the ability to ask questions and share their comments via Twitter.

Michael's morning keynote begins at approximately 8:30 and is titled, "How can we create students who can create meaningfully connections?" The afternoon keynote will begin around 12:15 pm and is titled, "Making connections: Experiments in Learning with New Media."

Visit the conference webpage for more information and please feel free to share this invitation with your colleagues.

http://portfolio.du.edu/newmedia

Information about how to the access the video stream will be posted here soon.

Please spread the word!

Adobe recently released a new Air application that "provides an easy way to learn about, track and share workflow best practices." WorkFlowLab provides a collaborative environment that will allow designers, developers, and project managers to communicate and share workflows.

I imagine that students could use WorkflowLab to help manage their classroom multimedia projects (think an interactive Gantt chart) ...and heck, it's free!

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/workflowlab/