NUTN Conference in Utah

Katie and Matt Blog

Recently I got to go to a great conference in Park City, Utah. Park City is where they have the Sundance festival and where they had the 2002 Winter Olympics. I love the mountains. Park City is about a 30 minute drive east of Salt Lake City up into the mountains. NUTN was held at a beautiful resort. It was a great conference – got to hear from speakers from Apple, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems, among others. I also presented a session about the future of the Internet. Conference activities included a trip to historic downtown Park City, a gondola ride up the mountain for an awards dinner, a geocaching activity, and some great food.

Recent Activities and Presentations

Katie and Matt Blog

Sorry for the inactivity here while I updated to a new blog software. WordPress is so nice. I was trying to write my own blog code, but with thousands of them already out there – why re-invent the wheel?

Anyway, our life has continued on and hopefully we can get to posting some updates here shortly. Katie is going to be defending her dissertation on July 2nd! I’ll let her blog about that in the future, but after that she will be “Dr. Crosslin.”

I have been doing some presentations recently. In March, I went to Galveston to present on “Effective Instructional Design Techniques in Moodle and Second Life” at the annual Texas Distance Learning Association conference. Not too exciting unless you are in to that stuff, but you can see my PowerPoint on this page if you want. There are also a couple pics of me presenting on this page.

This month I went to Park City, Utah to present at the National University Telecommunications Network’s 2008 conference. I have a bunch of beautiful pics and even a couple of quick video clips that I will post soon. I presented on “Future of the Internet: Web 3.0 and 3D Web.” That was fun and interesting. See more information on this page.

New Portfolios Online

Katie and Matt Blog

Katie and I both have online portfolios. Mine is a bit more complete than Katie’s, but we will get that fixed. Here is the address for both of them:

http://www.mattcrosslin.com
http://www.katiecrosslin.com

Also, Matt has been keeping a micro-blog recently on Jaiku.com. A micro-blog is just a place where you keep random, short thoughts and updates flowing during the day. You can see the micro-blog updates on the sidebar of this page, or at this address:

http://grandeped.jaiku.com/

TxDLA Conference Presentations

Katie and Matt Blog

Katie and I were both selected to present at the 2007 TxDLA (Texas Distance Learning Association) conference. Katie’s presentation was called “Moodle for High School: Practical Use for Blended Learning.” I had two presentations: “Web2.0 Alphabet Soup: CSS, RSS, XML, and AJAX” and “3-D Learning Management System: Moodle + Second Life.” The PowerPoints for these presentations can be downloaded here. Also, the session for Web2.0 was recorded. You can find a low quality audio recording here.

Overall, we had a great time at the conference. Coming home was hard due to a cancelled flight, but at least we made it. At the end of May, I am going to be traveling to Austin to present at a conference. One presentation will be on the difference between blogs and discussion boards in online education, and the other will be another presentation on Web2.0.

TxDLA 2007 Conference Presentations

Katie and Matt Blog

Katie and I just found out that our proposals for presentation at the Texas Distance Learning Association’s annual conference were accepted. Katie will be presenting “Moodle for High School: Practical Use for Blended Learning.” I will be doing two sessions: “3-D Learning Management System: Moodle + Second Life” and “Web2.0 Alphabet Soup: CSS, RSS, XML, and AJAX.” Exciting news, I guess if you are in to this kind of stuff.

If you want descriptions for my sessions, you can find links on this page:

Featured Track: The Latest and Greatest

Katie’s session will be on this page, once she gets her employer to take care of registration and can officially acknowledge her session:

Track Selected: Technology Used Everyday

My First Official Quote Online

Katie and Matt Blog

Someone actually quoted something that I wrote online. As some of you know, I wrote an article about Blogs for an online newsletter for one of my favorite programs – Moodle. Every once and a while, someone mentions it in some blog. But they rarely tell me, so I have to search the Internet for it. Most authors have been nice, but I like to look to see what people are saying, just in case someone calls me an idiot or something. Well, in my recent search, I found an actual academic class that quote my article in an honest to goodness academic paper. I guess I have finally arrived 🙂

Anyway, here is the article. Scroll down to the section that says “Blog as Focus.”

http://edit574-blogs.wikispaces.com/Classifications+and+Conventions

And Now For Something Completely Different

Katie and Matt Blog

Well, not really. Just more of the same random babblings about life. Sorry that there haven’t been many updates recently. We have a little busy. I just took my comprehensive exams on Friday, so I have been studying like crazy since then. I think they went good, but we’ll find out on November 20th. Since I took the exams at UT Dallas, I got to hang out with my partners in crime from their business school’s Distance Education crew. We had a basic geek fest talking over cool technologies, virtual worlds, and looking at their sweet technology set-up. We need to start our own geek-con. Anyway, a good time (and Thai food) were had by all.

I’ve also been trying to get my Michael Knott tribute site ready for launch. I guess most of the people that read this don’t really even know who he is. But he’s one of my favorite musician/painters. He was once in a band with the legendary Dennis Dannell of Social Disctortion, before Dennis passed away. The band was called Strung Gurus, and they could have been great. Oh, well.

Also, as my semester winds down, I will try to get all of my grad school class projects here on this site. Speaking of this site, I am still tweaking on it. Soon, I hope to add some picture streams from Flickr and links to our Skype account. I will probably add some more security to this site before that, but it should be easy for most of you that know us to still get it 🙂

Also, I’m starting to max out my Google account, which gives me a free Blogger Beta account. So I decided to start the “Random Things I Think are Cool” blog… a place for me to geek out about technology, music, movies, or anything else I think is cool, without torturing my family and friends who read this but don’t care about my geek side.

Believe it or not, Katie is getting serious about posting her first blog entry here. Maybe she can write about the recent Pampered Chef party she hosted (which was a blast).

For those of you in Second Life, come say hello to me soon. Look for Tolkien Messlee.

More Information On My Presentation

Katie and Matt Blog

The summery of my IOL presentation is now online. If you want to see more about what I’ll be speaking on, you can go to this link:

http://www.telecampus.utsystem.edu/index.cfm/4,1456,82,32,html#Do

Now, if you want to know more about what all that is about, you’ll have to ask me. Also, for those that knew I have been working on some more web sites, here is the progress on those sites:

UT Brownsville School of Education
Mercy Place main site
mpConnet (Mercy Place communication center)

The mpConnect site is built on the open-source software (Moodle) that I am going to feature at my presentation on June 2nd.

We Want Your Money

Katie and Matt Blog

Katie and I are still adjusting to Suburbia. One of the things that I can’t get used to is the large number of people knocking on our door to sell us things. Salad, bug control, lawn chemicals, you name it. They all claim to be able to save me money. But I have to spend money on their product every month in order to save. Hmmmm…..

Also, I recently got a promotion at work. I haven’t really figured out what I am supposed to be doing differently now, but at least I get a new title. Instructional Systems Specialist.