Tennessee DEN

This is not my day for Internet connections.  It took me 3 tries to get my last post blogged because I kept getting my wifi connection dropped.  Now I’m back at the hotel and it just happened again (always just as I am pressing "save" on this blog!).  So…let’s see if we can get this baby put to bed this time around!

This morning we spent an hour looking at Discovery’s presence in Second Life with Steve Dembo and the SL Leadership Council.  I have to say I was really impressed.  I can’t wait to get back in there and fly over to EduIsland II.  After looking around at our "headquarters," the council took Steve over to the Genome Project.  Using his SL avatar, Steve journeyed inside a 3-D cell.  How cool is that?

Our breakout sessions covered software and websites as we looked at a new beta product for Discovery, changes to the 3 Builders in unitedstreaming, and Web 2.0.  These sessions were led by Lance, Matt, and Steve.  We learned so much stuff that I can’t possibly list it all here.  I’ll do some follow-ups when the conference is over to let you know about some of the new things we covered.  In the meantime, Steve’s list of Web 2.0 sites can be found here.  It’s a wiki, so add your own!

We also spend some time after lunch with Shelly Santora Jones, the guru of all things unitedstreaming.  It is so neat to interact with these creative genuises!  You can look at the improvements to the 3 Builders at Matt’s blog.

Tonight, after dinner on the Discovery rooftop, everyone else went to Washington DC for a guided tour.  Me?  I had to finish a final exam, so I stayed behind (wipe a tear for me).  Now it is late, so I am going to copy this blog to the clipboard and try to post it again.  I dare the Internet gods to defy me this time!

Okay, it is right after lunch and we are in a great discussion about ways to make unitedstreaming better.  Lots of good ideas coming through.  If you have an idea, post your comment here.  The "powers that be" do check these blogs and may find your idea to be absolutely great!

In the meantime, here is a quick slideshow that demonstrates some of the stuff we’ve done in the last day.  Steve Dembo took us through the DEN’s presence on Second Life (great leadership council there!) and several Web 2.0 tools (more on those later).  Lance and Matt also took us through several good summertime ideas, including some cool work with a beta software used on PC tablets (more on that later, too!)

Okay, this is technically day 3, but I was too wiped out last night to post a blog.  Now, refreshed and fed, this is my third attempt to post this morning.  Discovery is a wonderful company with wonderful products, but their wireless connections…..

Anyway, we spent yesterday with Joe Brennan learning about digital storytelling, storyboarding, creating interesting camera angles, telling stories with no words, setting mood, using green scrreens, and (of course) doing the work.  I can’t post our team’s movie because we used a Beach Boys clip from YouTube that I’m sure is not copyright free.  Sorry!  Watch other blogs from around the country to see some of the other work that was created.  They were top notch!

Last night we spent time watching a preview, rough-cut, clip from a new episode of Predator Planet on the hammerhead shark.  WAY COOL!  The episode airs on August 1, so set your Tivos and VCRs.

Today is Web 2.0 with Steve Dembo as our opening act.  Then, we get our "big assignment".  Tell you more later!