Joseph will demonstrate how the University of Denver is leveraging the Flash Platform across the campus community to allow collaboration between students, faculty, and staff in a number of our web applications. Connectivity to Facebook and Twitter services will be covered as well as specialized collaborative services in University applications like CourseMedia™ and the tracking of targeted activity through Google Analytics APIs.

(I know the audio isn’t the best, apologies!)

Monday evening marked a great reception at the Fairmount. Great to catch up with other AELs that were present last year, new AELs or those I hadn’t met previously, and many of the good people at Adobe I’ve worked so closely with over the past year.

Tuesday was full of information and presentations from Adobe product managers, creative directors, and platform managers. This marked some of my personal favorite sessions as we were given the opportunity to learn details on upcoming products, the general roadmap* and outlook for the Flash Platform (impressive!), and even demo sneaks of some KILLER upcoming technology enhancements. We also were treated to an excellent presentation on some items the Adobe XD team is working on.

Wednesday is reserved for AEL sessions; over 80 hours of these presentations were recorded and will be made available on the Adobe Education Leader AdobeTV channel later this year. I gave my talk on Using Collaborative Media Services with Flash in University Applications and it was very well received. Really, all of the talks I attended were quite compelling and covered a wide range of areas – looking forward to catching up on those sessions I missed.

Thursday consisted of some longer sessions on industry and product-specific hands-on trainings. I attended the industry track all day and there was some really compelling stuff presented. Some of the highlights include an update from SoDA and an overview of how the upcoming digital publishing workflow for devices will be done (Yeah, the WIRED iPad stuff!)

On Friday morning we had our quarterly meeting followed by a wrap-up session. Those AELs who were not physically present in San Jose were able to attend through a live Connect session.

This was my second Institute and was the fifth overall. What an absolutely stellar time! Many, many thanks to the Adobe Education Team and all the AELs who helped make this event so memorable. Some of you reading this might think I am being far too positive about such a “corporate relationship” and perhaps some corrupting influence is being spread at events such as this. As fellow AEL, Phil Ice, has written: “I am certain there are some who are reading this blog who believe that the purpose is to turn people in education into marketing machines – nothing could be further from the truth.” It’s a beneficial relationship for everyone involved and Adobe does HIGHLY value the education community. Thank you again, Adobeans, for listening to us and being receptive to even our harshest criticisms! I do hope to see many of you either at Adobe MAX in October, or at some other event very soon.

* Don’t let anyone tell you Adobe is “lazy” when it comes to Flash Player and the overall platform. Things are about to accelerate beyond anything we’ve seen in the past couple of years!

For those who do not know, the Adobe Summer Institute is an annual gathering of Adobe Education Leaders for a small, focused, 5-day conference hosted by Adobe at their San Jose, CA headquarters.

My proposal reads as follows:

Using Collaborative Media Services with Flash in University Applications
11:15 am.-12:05 pm. Wednesday July 28. 2010

* Joseph will demonstrate how the University of Denver is leveraging the Flash Platform across the campus community to allow collaboration between students, faculty, and staff in a number of our web applications. Connectivity to Facebook and Twitter services will be covered as well as specialized collaborative services in University applications like CourseMedia™ and the tracking of targeted activity through Google Analytics APIs.

This presentation will have both general overview and code example portions and will include a general overview of services such as Adobe Social, Adobe Stratus, and the ActionScript 3.0 Client Library for Facebook Platform.

* Description may not be final.

Last year’s Summer Institute was spectacular and I know that this one will be even better (No, really- I was on the advisory committee. Gonna be awesome!)

I’ll record my presentation, if possible, else you may be able to catch it on AdobeTV later on in the year.

I haven’t really talked about this much; but in January, I was awarded an “Adobe Education Leader Impact Award” by Adobe Systems, Inc. and the great group of people who work on Adobe’s education team. Now that I’ve received the (quite handsome!) plaque, I want to make mention of it here in a spirit of gratitude and thanksgiving.

I’m honored to be named and such and hope that I can continue to contribute to the community in a manner befitting a declaration such as this!

In this final session, you will learn how to implement a video solution on your campus, using the tools and technologies previously presented in this series. Nick, John, and Joseph will go deeper into the technology behind a complete video solution, steps for implementation and decisions to be made in your implementation, all the way through getting video live on your website.

Discover new and exciting ways to increase the exposure, enrollment, and fundraising potential of your university through the use of video on your university’s website. From distance learning, to the broadcast of live athletic events and artistic performances, to campus tours and new student orientation, all of this and more can be brought to life on your website, increasing the interest of potential students, keeping alumni engaged in their alma mater, and thereby bringing more revenue to your institution.

Hear from representatives from the University of Denver about their successes with Flash video on their campus!

Adobe Education Leader Institute 2009
San Jose, California
July 22nd 2009

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.

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.

An Adobe Certified Associate credential certifies individuals have the entry-level skills to plan, design, build, and maintain effective communications using different forms of digital media.

If you’ve been using any of the products for a good amount of time, you probably don’t even need to study for the ACA exams. They are fairly straightforward and contain a mix of multiple choice questions and product interface simulations that you must perform. A pretty slick system!

Adobe Certified Associate
Rich Media Communication using Adobe Flash CS4
Web Communication using Adobe Dreamweaver CS4
Visual Communication using Adobe Photoshop CS4

In the future, I’d like to try my hand at the Adobe Certified Expert exams which I understand to be much more rigorous.