[Edu-sig] Postmortem of my OSCON talk

[urnerk@qwest.net]

My presentation:

I had tech support fiddling with sound during the opening, while I browsed
my presentation manager's source code for a minute or two -- didn't get
into it as deeply as I'd have liked, but hey, it's on the web. The sound
problem was soon solved.

Then I launched into the slides, with an interruption at slide 9 to go out
on the web and run both Springie and Fluidiom. My general theme: thanks to
open source and design science, our school's ability to collaborate has
become vastly easier and more effective over the years.

I covered a lot of material using a sort of frenetic pin-ball/scatter- gun
approach, using the slides as a guide: the nationless Fuller Projection,
Rick's dome program, tensegrity, elastic interval geometry, octet truss,
sphere packing, quadrays, Grunch of Giants, intellectual property,
education reform, making a difference. A bit too manic for my taste (45
minutes isn't much time). The people who came to the table afterwards
seemed seriously into learning more, especially with regard to providing
kids with a better education. One guy asked what planet I was from.

At one point in my talk, I predicted we'd soon have open source
repositories of downloadable audio/video clips, which kids'd pull down to
their computer desktops, mix with new content, and reupload back to the
servers (the same process used with software today, but applied to making
video). Schools like ours could harness this economy to foment the
production of more relevant educational materials.

[ the above is an excerpt from my longer blog entry of today ]


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