I will be entering my fifth year of teaching at Bradley this fall. In that time I have taught several classes on multimedia authoring, using tools like Director and Flash to produce microsites, games and simple applications. I have also taught a senior level capstone class where Rich Internet Applications were designed and prototyped, then composited with devices in original video shot by my students in a “Starfire”-like what-if video depicting ubiquitous wireless connectivity. You can see that one here. Additionally, I have taught course on server side development using PHP/MySQL and a intro to web design class that focuses on web standards and covers XHTML/CSS and JS. Well, I have another one to add to that. Read on to find out more about it. (more…)

Some golfing, though. Feels good. The weather is looking nice and it’s Saturday, so there. But, before I go and enjoy the day, here are some really cool links for you to check out. A couple very talented friends of mine at cascadingstyle.net have a series of posts detailing their SMS/Drupal/Services/Flash integration project. That’s right. SMS. Drupal. Flash. All connected via web services. Displayed live on giganto screens for all to see. 1000 people in the audience. It was really cool. Here’s a video from Vimeo that shows a little bit about the show. I helped out by writing a generative screensaver that played while everyone enjoyed their dinners.

The Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance Text Messaging from Sven on Vimeo.
You gotta go read his posts. He shares code, process an everything. A blueprint for success, if you will.

My fellow Bradley Multimedia faculty members and many of my colleagues at Iona (some of them the same people ) have been working feverishly on the media for a large event Bradley University will be hosting next week to kick off it’s Renaissance Campaign. The work done thus far has been tremendous. A full week of green screen shooting, two full weeks of post and lots and lots of hours are going into this. I’ll let the respective people working on the shoot, motion graphics, quiz engine/SMS gateway and webservice powered live updating Flash trivia games and Dataton Watchout system powering the 4 high lumen linked projectors blog their own part of the production (I know I left some links out there, sorry all…). My good friend and a designer I respect, Jim Ferolo had asked me to help on the project. He wanted me to produce a generative drawing effect that would sample some HDR photos and use the campaign’s logo to create a graphic wash/drawing effect on the images. To see the results continue… (more…)

I gave a presentation at Bradley where I introduced Flex to a group of students. Many thanks to Suzanne Nguyen at Adobe for the freebies and giveaways for the event. I gave away a copy of “Programming Flex 2″ and several copies of the DVD training for Flex from Total Training. The Jelly YoYos were a It went really well and they seemed interested in downloading the educational version of Flex. I have actually about 4-5 student ask me questions about Flex in the days after the presentation. In the group of about 20 students nearly 3/4 of them said they would be interested in taking a RIA focused class where Flex, AJAX and Silverlight would be taught. Very cool indeed! You can download the PDF of the slides here.

I’m happy to let everyone know that this coming Monday, Erik Natzke will be presenting at Bradley University in Peoria, IL. The multimedia program is sponsoring his presentation which will be taking place March 10th at 7PM in Baker Hall, Room B51. Everyone is welcome to attend. If you haven’t seen him present before, don’t miss this opportunity. You can find out more information about the event here. We’re happy to have him come and think this presents a wonderful chance for our students to see some truly groundbreaking work. Don’t miss it!

I gave a presentation to the Introduction to Multimedia Class (MM113), the title was “Multimedia as Art”. In 50 minutes, I had to cover Dada to Joshua Davis. Whew. A tal order, but overall, it went smoothly. I have the slides notes in a PDF for you here.

Without checking the hyperlinks and seeing the accompanying media, it might be a bit dreary, but the art shown was of course pretty fantastic.

We talked about Charles Csuri, John Whitney, COSA, the early Demo Scene, Director, Flash and the newest trends in generative art and realtime graphics created with Flash, Processing, Context Free, and VVVV.

Thanks to Scott Cavanah for inviting me to come talk.

I have given my students an assignment to recreate/emulate the look of a website using only their own custom CSS, necessary image files, and the pre-existing HTML template at CSSZenGarden.com. In order to help illustrate the assignment’s goals, take a look at this remake of my visualrinse.com site template in CSSZenGarden form. Enjoy.

If time allows this week, I may do another CSS remake. I have a couple sites in mind that could use a ZenGarden version.

In addition to my full-time job, I also teach 1 class per semester at Bradley Univeristy in the Multimedia Program there. We’re a dedicated bunch of people and we work hard to produce some VERY cool projects (The HD presentation of The Addng Machine and the installation Streaming being just a couple of them… All that said, August 29th is the big day.. the semester is starting back up. Welcome, welcome!

If you’re not a student of mine, sorry, but if you are… keep tuned here. I will be posting some relevant topics here from time to time. I should be worth your while to check this site out now and then. I recommend subscribing to the feed, actually.

My friend, Sven, wrote a post about a visiting artist, Paul Cantanese, who spoke at Bradley University last week. I was unable to make the lecture, unfortunately. Paul does some great work and is very much into Processing right now, as I gather from the chatter around campus. Paul turned Sven onto the awesome Graffletopia. Wow! What a cool resource. Wish I could have caught his session, it’s always great to .

As a part time instructor, and one mainly focused on professionally minded multimedia and web development, it’s important to keep my toolbox full of great stuff… I try to choose the best books, best tools and best software to maximize my actual contact time with my students (which unfortunately is fairly minimal as I am also employed full time). For example, Sven relayed my use of Del.icio.us to Paul as a library of sorts. To me this was never a real innovative idea, as it just seemed to fit the purpose of Del.icio.us perfectly for me. It’s always on, allows asynchronous communication and works dependably and reliably.

My del.icio.us page has nearly 400 links that are purely web design and development focused. It’s primarily standards focused with mentions of multimedia content generally only when there is crossover between the two realms. I have been building that list over the last two years and do prune it fairly regularly for dead links. Not only is it a reference for my students, but one for me as well. I add to it and consult it often.

I also have a library of books that could choke a horse. Some favorites, and ones that I teach from currently: Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards, Craig Grannell’s Web Designer Reference, Eric Meyer’s CSS Definitive Guide. Beyond that, I have books from Joey Lott, Colin Moock and many others on my shelf. Some of my O’Reilly favorites include Databases in Depth, The Agile Web Developer, and Javascript the Definitive Guide. I appreciated the mission and vision of Amibient Findability, but found it lacking in substance. I generally lean towards O’Reilly titles, but find the Friends of Ed books a pleasure to read as well.

For the last two semesters, when I taught a class on PHP/MySQL, we used the CSS Definitive Guide to serve as a desk reference and the Dreamweaver 8 with PHP by Jeffrey Bardzell for the main software teaching book. As I tried to keep the class largely tool agnostic and more focused on the actual code written, all work in the Bardzell book was self directed with me available for questions if needed. While the Dreamweaver Server behaviors are nice, in the long run, I don’t believe a college level course in web design should tie your knowledge to a software vendor.

Beyond that, I have recently begun introducing my students to Color Schemer, Kuler and other design tools for more making more objective color choices in their designs. I also introduce my students to the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug Javascript debugging tools as I don’t want to think about designing a website without them. We pull out the terminal and learn Ping, Whois, Traceroute, etc… I also like to show them Netcraft.com and the Wayback machine as I think they have invaluable info buried within. I am really looking forward to seeing Sven’s VMWare Windows web development image that he has been cooking up, complete with nearly every version of IE ever made and a few other little tricks – should be a great tool for the Intel iMacs in the labs.

I am interested in hearing other resources, etc. I should be investigating from other instructors out there… What are you using to help your students navigate this big world? Web resources, books, software etc.

So are you in my 365 class? Yeah? Well this is for you…

I don’t know where you can get this shirt from, but I would really like to know. Found the image on Flickr