Data Unbound

I'm excited to be teaching a pre-conference seminar at the Educause 2009 Annual Conference. My proposal for running a half-day seminar Creating and Enabling Web Mashups was accepted.  The seminar will take place at Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 8:30AM.  I'm looking forward to spending some time in Denver.

Here's a short abstract for the session:

There are thousands of web mashups that recombine everything from Google Maps and Flickr with useful data drawn from multiple website.  Mashups are educational, fun, and even transformative.  In this tutorial, you will begin to build mashups that address problems of interest to you.   You will learn how to combine APIs and data into mashups.   You will also learn how to let others recombine content from your website.

Here's a longer abstract:

The Web contains thousands of mashups that recombine everything from Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon.com, the New York Times  with useful information about travel, finance, real estate, and more. By fusing elements from multiple web sites, mashups are often informative, fun, and even transformative — representing the way the Web as a whole is heading.

In this hands-on tutorial, you will learn how to build basic mashups and how to develop mashups to address problems of interest to you.   You will learn how to exploit such web elements as URLs, tags, and RSS feeds in your mashups; and how to combine APIs and data into mashups.   You will also learn how to enable users to recombine content from your website.  Although the most sophisticated mashups demand a wide range of technical knowledge, anyone with a solid knowledge of HTML will be able to learn practical skills from this tutorial.

Yesterday, I installed the new version 3.0 of Open`Office.org. I had configured the old version of open office.org to map Ctrl-Q to insert a timestamp of the current time. (I'm using the key mapping from Ecco Pro.) It took me a little while to figure out how to do this configuration once again. Hence I made a little screencast to remind myself of how to do this task, should I have to do it again:

This was also an opportunity to remind myself how to make a rudimentary screencast using Camtasia Studio. In the future I have to learn how to create more sophisticated effects. I'm also looking into using Jing Project: Visual conversation starts here. Mac or Windows, not only because it's free but actually might be more convenient for simple application. I must say that I'm tempted to upgrade my Camtasia Studio setup to version 1.5 because of its new Zoom-n-Pan Effects. have to download the new version and evaluate whether it's worth the money to upgrade from version 4.0)

On a larger note, I can see making a lot more videos to document what I'm learning so that I can remember how to do things, will also teach others to perform some tasks. I think these videos will expand beyond recording the computer screen.