Derek's Flickr Feed for today| Marie's eKaq Flickr photos | Valerie's eKaq Flickr photos

Sat, July 19 - Not much production work today. The teachers have all left town for the weekend and there's not much we can do without them. It also drizzled on and off all day. Ironic, because we have a weather module to produce this year and "rain" is one of the vocabulary words but it never rained hard enough to show up on camera - at least not in a way that sells the word "rain." We now find ourselves in the untenable position of hoping we get enough rain to photograph but not enough to wash us out. Good luck on that!

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Derek's Flickr Feed for today | Marie's eKaq Flickr photos | Valerie's eKaq Flickr photos

Wed, July 16 - We've returned to Guatemala for the next phase of production for the Kaqchikel digital learning tool we're developing with the Stone Center. Or as we like to simply call it - eKaq2008! Read more about it...

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eKaqchikel Project Site | Marie´s eKaqchikel Flickr feed | Derek's Flickr feed for today

Still in Antigua, waiting for our ride to Panajachel . Just a slow, drizzly, summer sunday in one of the oldest cities in the Americas.

Went out this morning before the rain started in earnest to get some more interesting shots and stumbled on a foot race of some sort. Coincidentally, we need shots of athletes to illustrate specific dialogue, so I took a bunch.

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eKaqchikel Project Site | Marie´s eKaqchikel Flickr feed | Derek's eKaqchikel Flickr feed

Made it to Antigua with minimal delays. We're all here - Marie, Valerie, Lee, me and our nine over-packed and over-weight bags of production gear. Actually, they weren't over-weight at all. Was very careful to stay in the 50 lbs. checked baggage limit. Makes it hard to get a full two-camera production set up into Central America when you're dependant on your crew's baggage allotment to move everything, but we did it.

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Followed a link from Alan Levine's excellent new media blog (CogDogBlog) and found Autostitch. It's an amazing 2D automatic image stitching utility - 2D as in vertical and horizontal panoramas - and comes out of the AI lab at the University of British Columbia. It produces a seamless panorama from even the most casually captured images. It even manages to smooth out the shifting presence of moving people, cars, etc.

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Phillip Long over at MIT has a lot to say about institutions preparing to enter Second Life. The school's initial foray into that virtual world was part of an attempt to get freshmen into the right dorms. At MIT, you don't pick your final residence hall until you've been on campus for three weeks. Makes for a better long term match if you can see the place and get to know the character of the residents before you commit to the place for the entire year.

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Attended Victor Edmonds afternoon presentation on coursecasting and the state of the art. Victor runs the Educational Technology Services (ETS) at Berkeley, a dynamic organization and a real leader, for many years now, in the realm of on-line media production and delivery.

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Great sessions today, so far, including an absolutely riveting Keynote presentation from Edward Castronova of Indiana University. Ed's background is in economics and, in fact, he studies the economies of on-line virtual communities. But that's just the start.

As Ed says about these 3D immersive communities "That new world is more than 3D; more than immersive; more than online; more than entertainment; more than communication. It is all of those things, and one more, a new source of Meaning."

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Have arrived in Indianapolis with Marie for the 2007 New Media Consortium annual summer conference. There's a definite Web 2.0 flavor to the NMC's activities these days, especially with regards to the conference. Check out some of these sites and services the NMC are putting to use this year: Tumblr, Attendr, PageFlake, Twitter

Stay tuned for more...