This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Small Tools Big Ideas
I was thrilled to present at the Small Tools Big Ideas conference in New York last week. Carl Jones and I split a presentation on developing Stellar images as a presentation tool that uses external image repositories titled Cooperative Technology (pdf, 1.2MB).
Here are some more highlights from the conference.
I met Michael Feldstein, who's blog I've been reading for a while, and we had a chat while waiting line for lunch. His ideas on a Learning Management Operating System are looking better and better to me.
It's interesting how many people were working towards the same thing
- Separating image repositories from the presentation tools that remix the images
- Seek out a standard way for tools and repositories to talks (OKI and SRW are starts)
- Metadata that travels well
- An end to copyright insanity (or at least a good a workaround)
I got to see the best products in the 'teaching with images' market and meet the makers.
- MDID is cool, but Windows based which makes it hard for us to work with.
- ArtStor seems to be making a solid effort at being a good, sharing, edtech citizen and a money-making company at the same time. And they are using SRW now on their repositories (not sure how far that goes, though).
- Almagest is a great tool. They are hoping to tear it's repository half and it's presentation half apart so they can work together, but also work separately with other tools. (that could be great news for our tool!)
I had a chat with one of the reps from Saskia - a provider of high quality digital images for libraries. They are open to loading their images in DSpace and having copies moved to something like Stellar. They aren't concerned with turning off student access at the end of the semester. It's nice to hear of such reasonable policies.
Rachel Smith of the New Media Consortium gave a great keynote, drawing heavily from the horizon project at the NMC.
The Windows logo hovering over the panelists during the final panel Q&A drove me bonkers. After the short presentations, the projector stayed on, the screen saver kicked in and it was the floating Microsoft logo moving around every few seconds. I wanted to run up to the podium and smash the projector, sort of like in that seminal Apple ad where the woman smashes big brother.
There was so much more. It's hard to blog about such a rich experience. Big whuffie points to Beth Harris and Steven Zucker for their work.
I am writing this at Logan Airport on my way to Berkeley for a meeting on Sakai's course management API. It's been a busy couple of weeks.
Tags: smalltoolsbigideas mdid almaggest artstor stellar dspace