Looking into the Past

I was doing some updates to my PSU Blog this morning — mostly exporting old sites out of the MT 3 environment that we are looking to discontinue on October 15, 2008 (that was a hint). At any rate, I setup SFTP to PASS to move some images around and clean up my directories when I came across some of my old work.
When I say old work, I mean it. I came across a presentation I remember doing for an ETS Show and Tell back in 1999. At the time I was a World Campus Instructional Designer working on Electrical Engineering courses with my friend and colleague, Dr. Stu Kurtz. Stu and I both had a real interest in doing something very innovative … and while I think Stu and I drove each other crazy, we really drove our collective bosses even crazier. At the time, Stu and I wanted to deliver a full on course experience, complete with a bunch of rich media files (sorta like enhanced podcasts without the RSS), real world scenarios, links to videos, and a whole bunch of executable Mathmatica activities. We had a huge problem getting all of this to work from a web browser, so I built an Authorware “launcher” application that linked it all together. I hate to say it was fun finding ways to work the web back in the day.

At any rate, the presentation is still sitting in my PASS space — I always did hate PowerPoint, so I did my preso as a simple website. If you have any interest in what we were doing back in the day at the World Campus take a look … a couple things to note … the first is how much stuff we built for each and every course (help files, getting started guides, and other items) and the other is the use of First Class as the communication environment. Crazy stuff.