Educause 2009: Streaming Video for Education

I’d encourage anyone going to Educause in Denver to stop by the Adobe Booth (#909) for a theater presentation by myself and John Schuman.

Streaming Video for Education
Wednesday, November 4
12:45pm–1:15pm

In this session, you will learn the inner workings of a real-world video solution for higher education based on Adobe Flash technology. Join John Schuman, Adobe education solutions architect, and Joseph Labrecque, senior multimedia application developer at the University of Denver and an Adobe Education Leader, as they take you through the underlying technologies that went into the creation of the amazing video applications of the University of Denver.

UPDATE: Here are the slides in PDF format.

For more information, check out the previous seminar recordings.

Presentation for FITC @ Adobe MAX 2009

I gave my presentation at 3:30 on Monday in the FITC unconference room at Adobe MAX. It was well attended and everything went well, for the most part. I did not have a good wireless connection and couldn’t run a live demo- but had screenshots to cover me in such a case.

Thanks to FITC and Influxis for a great setup! Thanks to Adobe for publishing unconference sessions in official materials- it makes a big difference in terms of turnout!

Here are my slides in PDF format:
MAX-2009-FITC-Labrecque.pdf

And the source for my Midge experiment:
MidgeEvents.zip

Here is the video:

This was streamed live by the FITC/Influxis crew. Audio was being picked up from my internal laptop microphone, so I apologize for the quality!

Here is a supplemental video of what you would have seen if the LACC had reliable internet access:
Get the Flash Player to see this content.

On a related note, you may also want to check out John Schuman’s MAX session which makes mention of my work on the DU CourseMedia™ project:

A few friendly (but important!) corrections to the above presentation regarding the University of Denver:

• Regarding AIR, we do have a dedicated solution for AIR that works with a variety of projection systems in the various room configurations across campus. I actually presented on this project at FITC Unconference last year at MAX 2008.
• My team has 3 developers total, CourseMedia™ has 2 devs (the work of Alex Martinez on this project cannot be diminished – he is the CF/DB guy on this and it is truly his baby!), and all 3 of us are full time. We do employ some part time student workers though, who are also essential.
• Leslie Trumble isn’t my boss- that would be Julanna Gilbert, director of the CTL at DU :)

Many thanks to John for showcasing our work! With such great amounts of information you can’t expect to not have some inaccuracies – c’est la vie!

All sessions from Adobe MAX can be viewed from the following URL beginning October 11th: https://max.adobe.com/online/

UPDATE October 22 2009:
All sessions from FITC Unconference at Adobe MAX can be viewed at http://fitc.influxis.com/

Adobe MAX Updates

Just a quick note that I probably won’t get to posting materials from my session until after MAX is over. Just too much going on.

The session went really well- streamed live over http://fitc.influxis.com/ and recorded locally, as well. I’ll have my slides and a recording up soon.

Check Out the FITC Unconference @ Adobe MAX

Planning on attending Adobe MAX this year? Apart from the main event tracks, I highly encourage everyone to check out some of the sessions going on at the FITC Unconference. There is an amazing line-up of stellar speakers this year. Check out some of the session descriptions and I think you’ll agree that they are all incredibly compelling!

One of the really neat things about these sessions is that they are all 30-minute presentations, which means you’ll have plenty of time to either attend a whole bunch, or just sneak some in between the regular MAX presentations. The content is usually quite unique as well… definitely some stuff you won’t see in other areas.

I’m fortunate enough to be presenting for FITC again this year and would love to chat with anyone at the event regarding my presentation, or any of my work with Adobe, the University of Denver, or Fractured Vision Media.

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 the generation of unorthodox event logging from within Flash.

Don’t forget to contribute to this presentation!!! Mess with Midge and feed the data logs!

Reflections on the 2009 Adobe Education Leader Summer Institute

The 2009 Adobe Education Leader Summer Institute in now over and my intention is to document a few thoughts here while everything is still fresh in my mind.

About 80 Adobe Education Leaders from both K-12 and Higher Education institutions from around the world gathered at Adobe HQ in San Jose, CA for 5 days of networking, presentations, training, and corporate roadmaps. I’ve only been involved in this group since November of last year, so this was the first time I had personally attended this event. This is also the first year that Higher Education was formally represented.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, so tried not to have any sort of pre-conceived notions of how the week would play out. One of the most beneficial aspects of the event was the constant networking going on – a perpetual idea mill and information interchange center. I’m sure that if I had passed up on the 4 hours of sleep I got most nights, those 4 hours would also be spent engaged in intense discussion with my peers.

Most days allowed us to explore San Jose, Adobe HQ (the less secure portions, anyway), and interface with a great number of Adobe employees through presentations, round-tables, Q+A sessions, and some very nice dinner receptions. I found a lot of these individuals to be surprisingly frank and quite receptive to any of the ideas and thoughts that were proposed to them.

Wednesday provided everyone with an opportunity to make presentations to the group. I gave a presentation on what the University of Denver is doing in regard to the Flash Platform focusing on our work on the CourseMedia™ project and received a ton of positive feedback from both Adobe and other AELs. A really great experience although I had to cut the demo portion short due to time constraints. The slides can be downloaded as a PDF and the recording should be available on AdobeTV later on along with 25+ other extraordinary sessions.

I was delighted to find that everyone was very amiable and even though I was one of the new people in the group- was treated with the utmost respect whether conversing with other AELs, product managers, evangelists, or anyone on the education team at Adobe. What a wonderful group of people to be a part of – I cannot wait to begin some of the many collaborations seeded at this event.

Many thanks to Adobe and everyone that was a part of the planning and execution of the institute this year. It will not be soon forgotten and I look forward to future events and hopefully seeing everyone again in 2010.