Sue Waters

It is official Alan Levine has left our shores and arrived safely back home in America. After an amazing 18 day “whirl-wind” Australian Cross Country Tour where he was in a different city almost every night I am left wondering, after enjoying reading his daily adventures – does this mean there will be a vaccuum in my life? No more CogDogRoo blog posts? 😦

I was fortunate to attend Alan’s presentations on Melbourne and Perth; plus lucky to spend some time with him. Considering he was not well during this trip I am totally in awe at his work output. I spent 3 weeks at conferences, and was well, but could not match his incredible work.

Even though I did attend his workshops in a couple of locations I did not get the opportunity to participate in all his workshops and presentations because sessions at each locations was customized for their local audience. Fortunately Alan has left us the CogDogRoo wiki which contains a wealth of buried bones and gems that are a must to work through.

Here is an overview of the workshops and presentations on CogDogRoo wiki:

1. Being There: In that undistributed future

Emphasis of this presentation was “The thing about technology is you can not watch from the outside to work out how to use it—you need to embed and immerse yourself in this technology. Too often we look at a technology and make judgments without having the knowledge to make those judgments properly — because we have not taken the time to learn what the technology is about. “

Read my notes from this session here! Check out Alan’s slideshare, Ustream recording, audio recording, notes and links from this session here! Make sure you check out his images from these his powerpoint on Flickr because he has added lots of extra notes to each slide!

2. What’s on your Horizon?

Horizon Report is released by the New Media Consortium each year in January which charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning and creative expression on the horizons of less than one year, two to three year and four to five year (here is the 2007 Horizon Report and this is a video interview I did previously with Alan on the Horizon Report).

During this presentation Alan overview the process involved in looking at the horizon of emerging technologies and discussed our Australian Horizon. Read my notes from this session here! Check out Alan’s slideshare, Ustream recording, audio recording, notes and links from this session here!

3. Virtual Worlds – Promise and Perils

This was an engaging introduction to what are Virtual Worlds and why they are becoming popular. As I am already using Second Life and my kids use Virtual worlds like World of Warcraft I wondered how others that had no exposure to Virtual Worlds would find this session. I was extremely pleased to hear it inspired people to join Second Life.

Read my notes from this Virtual World session here! Listen my audio podcast from the session here! Check out Alan’s powerpoint slides (displayed as a Flickr slide show. If you click on a slide it displays the information he has written about that slide, including URLs that you can follow for further information — this is a great feature of Slideflickr.com which he is using really well) notes and links from this session here!

4. 50 Ways to Tell a Story

This resources from this workshop is absolutely mind blowing. Definitely Alan is amazing crazy? because he used 50 ways to tell the one Story (about a dog called Domino) by road testing 50 different online tools. He worked through the whole process of:

• What is involved in telling good stories
• Sources of images, audio and videos that you can use to tell your story
• Online tools that you can use to create your story
• Example of the story created with each online tools so that you can check out before trying if the tools is what you really want to use

I used this resource to determine which online video creators were worth testing (the posts related to this are Sunday Job! Road Test Some More Online Video Creators! and Job for Saturday! Road test of online video creators!).

5. Precious Web Gems

😦 Wish I had got to do this session! The idea was for participants expose themselves to a small range of practical Web 2.0 tools that had been recommended by educators rather than being overwhelmed by too many. When I get an opportunity I plan to work through the task, road test some Web 2.0 Gems and the Web 2.0 Laundry list.

6. Powerful Personal Portals

This session was on how to use free web tools such as Google Home Pages, PageFlakes or Netvibes to quickly and easy build custom portal-like web sites to bring information from multiple web sites to the one location (here is the information from this session).

Pleaaaaase if you are reading this blog and not bringing the posts from this blog into a feed reader like Google Reader, bloglines or netvibes — make the time to set up your feed reader — it will save you time. Here is my “How to” subscribe to blogs information to get you started.

FINAL NOTE

If you are wondering about what the? with the title of this post check out this! (wonder if you need to be an Aussie to get it?)