“Condemnation” Nominated!

“Condemnation” from A Prison of Oneself is a JPF 2009 Nominee in the “Ambient” category. It’s nice to see this album get some extra publicity and recognition from a professional organization such as JPF.

This piece was nominated from a pool of 42,000 albums and 560,000 songs – so that’s pretty cool! I doubt this will move past the nominee phase, but never expected it to get this far since most do not have an appreciation for this type of music. A pleasant surprise.

What started as an informal way to recognize our best member submissions has grown into the largest Music Awards program in the world! Our volunteer judges include industry professionals, peers and music fans. Our sole criteria for judging is “Does it move you?”

We’ll be publishing a Press Release in the next few days regarding this nomination.

DU CourseMedia™ Released!

The University of Denver Center for Teaching & Learning has (finally) released the DU CourseMedia™ Course Media Management System. This has been a focus of my work for the past 5 months or so and is one of the major CTL projects for 2009. Some may recall the mention of the DUVAGA system from time-to-time. CourseMedia™ is DUVAGA reborn.

DU CourseMedia™ was developed by the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Denver as a course-based media presentation tool for organizing and presenting high quality images and videos to system participants. Although it was initially built with the needs of faculty in the school of art and art history in mind, DU CourseMedia™ is now used by faculty in many other disciplines in approximately 250 courses each term.

Through DU CourseMedia™, instructors have access to over 50,000 art and world history images and over 2000 library reserve videos. DU Course Media™ allows instructors to create online galleries that can include streaming video, images, text slides, discussion boards, quizzes, and voice narrations.

Some of the highlights of the new release are as follows:

• Complete overhaul of how media objects are accessed
• Entire media galleries can now be shared across permitted websites
• Gallery object functionality is raised one level to become more accessible for users
• The new Media Viewer is written from scratch with the input of DU faculty, staff and students
• The Media Viewer is a Flash application written upon the Flex framework
• The VPS Projection System, an application which runs upon the Adobe AIR runtime has also recieved a number of updates

I’ll be presenting on DU CourseMedia™ at the Adobe Education Leader Institute this summer.

To see an overview of the new features, you can check out a screencast produced by Alex Martinez, ColdFusion developer for the CTL.

A screencast specific to the Media Viewer was also authored by Jenn Light.

Upcoming Conference Presentations

This is simply an update to showcase some upcoming presentations of mine:

Leveraging the Flash Platform to Deliver Dynamic Media Across Campus

This presentation will focus on the DU CourseMedia™ application built by the University of Denver Center for Teaching and Learning and examine the many problems solved with such a robust set of tools to deliver audio, video, and images across the DU network and beyond.

DU CourseMedia™ was developed by the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Denver as a course-based media presentation tool for organizing and presenting high quality images and videos to system participants. Although it was initially built with the needs of faculty in the school of art and art history in mind, DU CourseMedia™ is now used by faculty in many other disciplines in approximately 250 courses each term.

Through DU CourseMedia™, instructors have access to over 50,000 art and world history images and over 2000 library reserve videos. DU Course Media™ allows instructors to create online galleries that can include streaming video, images, text slides, discussion boards, quizzes, and voice narrations.

FITC Unconference at Adobe MAX
Los Angeles, California
October 2009
Custom Event Reporting from Flash to Google Analytics

With the ability to define and report custom events from within your Flash application, you retain control over how specific events are reported and the information contained in these reports. This presentation will cover the implementation of the Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash ActionScript 3 API for generating custom events and emulated page views from within Flash.

Stretching Oneself Too Thin?

I’ve been running this weblog for a few years now and find myself contributing to more than just one… http://blogs.adobe.com/educationleaders/ and http://ctl.du.edu/techblog/ are some other weblogs that I contribute to. Not to mention Twitter. I’m beginning to question whether or not things are getting too cloudy for me. Maybe I need some new direction. Maybe I should just hunker down and complete Shudderflowers. There are a lot of things that I find myself wondering after, lately.

Canon Customer Support Rocks!

Recently, my 6 year old Canon miniDV video recorder stopped capturing any video aside from total blackness. A quick search on the Google led me to this:

It has come to our attention that the vendor-supplied CCD image sensor used in certain Canon digital cameras and digital video camcorders may cause the following malfunction: When the product is used in recording or playback mode, the LCD screen and/or electronic viewfinder may exhibit either a distorted image or no image at all.

Sounded like the exact problem I was experiencing. A quick email later and I soon had an RMA and UPS label to ship my unit back to Canon for free servicing.

Not 7 days later and I’ve got the thing back, replacement image sensor with complementary cleaning and checkup. Nice job, Canon- you guys are great!