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.

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

St. Patrick’s Day

Katie and Matt Blog

I guess this is a little late, but I really missed anything for St. Patrick’s Day. My Dad told me once that I am probably mostly Irish, so I guess I should have at least done something that day – ate at Bennigan’s, or something. Oh, well…. there’s always next year.

We actually just laid low due to the heavy rains. We live off of a highway exit that was closed due to flooding, but nothing came close to threatening us. Other than putting up with freaked out drivers on the road, it was a pretty low key weekend.

I have finally moved into the iPod age. I won an iPod Shuffle at a conference I went to recently. I finally got around to getting it set up, and I have to say that it is pretty cool. I can see why they are so popular. And the the big version has a screen and everything – must be almost addicting. maybe I will win one of those at another conferences.

Speaking of conferences, a proposal of mine was accepted for an Online Learning conference in Austin in June. This was my first proposal. So, this will also be my first presentation in an academic setting. The topic will be “Do-it-yourself LMS: Open-source Possibilities.” If you really want to know what that is, you can e-mail me about it 🙂

Teaching at Night ATS

Katie and Matt Blog

We’ve probably been spending most of our time doing Night ATS stuff recently. We are having a fund raiser this week-end – a chili cook-off. And I (Matt) am going to be teaching one night next week, so I am busily trying to get an outline, and a PowerPoint, and even a website ready by then (Am I over-doing it, maybe?). Hopefully, we will get back to the house by Halloween weekend.