Happy to report that I received word this morning of my acceptance as an Adobe Education Leader (higher education) for a new two-year term!

For those unaware of the program:

The Adobe Education Leaders Program highlights the contributions of innovative educators in higher ed and K–12 who are effectively using Adobe tools and applications to promote excellence in the classroom.

Adobe Education Leaders are dedicated to enhancing creativity and collaboration and improving the teaching and learning experience. They share their expertise through workshops and conferences and help develop standards-based curriculums that are used worldwide. As Adobe updates it products and develops new ones, Education Leaders provide valuable input through beta programs and focus groups.

AELs serve for two-year periods, following which – they must reapply for a new term. I have been an AEL since Adobe expanded the program to higher education 3 years ago. I’m pleased and honored to be able to serve in this role for the next two years.

Join Joseph Labrecque [Adobe Education Leader, Higher Ed] from the University of Denver as he provides a session demonstrating the uniquely portable nature of the Adobe CS5 toolchain originating in Illustrator and branching out to Photoshop, InDesign, and finally Flash Catalyst. See how you can easily take some Winter scene assets and use them across Adobe tools to create a printed postcard, interactive flip-page greeting, or animated snowscape all using the same asset pool!

Download the starter assets!

Note that I’ll also be covering the conference for ActiveTuts+ via Twitter during the entire conference.

*my sessions :)

6:30 – Adobe Education Welcome Reception for the Adobe Education Summit and Adobe Design Achievement Awards

8:30 – MAX EDU: Education Summit at MAX Welcome
9:00 – MAX EDU: The Adobe Experience
9:45 – MAX EDU: Industry Collaboration Masters Degree with the BBC
10:45 – MAX EDU: Adobe Curriculum, Certification, and Professional Development Resources
11:15 – MAX EDU: Rich Media Experiences with Adobe Tools
12:15 – MAX EDU: Panel Discussion: Research Projects Leveraging Adobe Technologies in University Programs
1:00 – MAX EDU: ROME Technology on Campus
1:35 – MAX EDU: Open Source Media Framework for Education*
2:20 – MAX EDU: RIAs that Keep Students Engaged
2:55 – MAX EDU: Visual Effects Training at USC School of Cinematic Arts
3:40 – MAX EDU: Adobe tools in the Humber College Film and TV Program
4:15 – MAX EDU: A shortcut to amazing animations across multiple devices with Flash CS5
4:50 – MAX EDU: InterACT with the Flash Platform!
7:00 – MAX EDU: 10th Annual Adobe Design Achievement Awards Ceremony
9:00 – MAX EDU: Adobe Design Achievement Awards Gallery Opening and Reception

9:30 – MAX GENERAL: Welcome to the Revolution
2:00 – MAX: Optimizing Flash Player Compatible Content for Mobile Devices
3:00 – FITC: Comparing Web Video Technologies, from Flash to HTML5 to Silverlight
3:30 – MAX: Flash Sneak Peek: A Glimpse at the Future
4:00 – FITC: Pushing Pixels: Blitting on Desktop, Web & Mobile
5:00 – MAX: Fusing Art and Technology with Flash Professional CS5
8:00 – MAX GENERAL: Meet the Teams

8:30 – MAX: Flash, Flex, HTML5: Ouch, My Head Hurts!
10:00 – MAX GENERAL: User Experience: The Next Generation
12:30 – FITC: Developing AIR for Android using Flash CS5
1:00 – FITC: Flash, Android and Real-Time Geospatial Tracking
1:30 – FITC: Going Native In air 2.0
2:00 – FITC: “Emergent Collective One” – All the Little Pieces…*
2:30 – FITC: 3D Flash Gaming on TV
3:30 – MAX: Robust Video Player Development with Open Source Media
Framework
4:30 – FITC: Air Wolf
6:00 – MAX GENERAL: MAX Sneaks
8:00 – MAX GENERAL: MAX Bash

8:00 – MAX: Roadmap: Flash Platform Runtimes
9:30 – MAX: MAX UnAwards widget uncovered: developing personalized video
apps on the web
11:00 – MAX: Progressing beyond the Desktop at Universities with Adobe AIR*
12:00 – FITC: The Lazy Programmer (and Phillip Puzzle Page CS5 drawing)
1:30 – MAX: Developing Your First AIR for TV Application

This in no way accounts for any other morning or evening events I’ll be attending during MAX 2010… but the majority of sessions and such I plan to attend are listed. Making it easy for people to track me down – get in touch!

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.