Mark DuBois Weblog

I participated in AdobeMAX 2009 (Los Angeles) in early October. Without a doubt, this was a great conference. Some of the highlights are listed below. In addition to AdobeMAX, I was able to participate in a WOW Summit (Sunday), an Adobe Community Managers meeting (Sunday), a reception for educators and Adobe Education Leaders (Sunday), a meeting of the Los Angeles Web Professionals Adobe User Group (Monday), and a meeting of the Educator’s Advisory Board for Lynda.com (Tuesday). Obviously, there was a lot packed of information and networking packed into a few days.

Adobe Community Managers summit (Sunday, Oct. 4) highlights – roughly 150 people were present at this meeting (some 40 were present virtually via ConnectPro). There are 510 active Adobe User Groups representing 40 different languages (from Arabic to Thai) with 270 community experts and 11 community champions. Rachael introduced her team from Adobe and discussed why we were present and where this initiative is going in the future. Dee Sadler reviewed her work with Adobe user groups in the Kansas City area. Himanshu Mody reviewed efforts in promoting Adobe technologies within India. Elder Vasquez reviewed a number of Adobe events held in Latin America. Nate Beck reviewed his work with BugQuash. Amanda Johnson and Josh Lucero discussed the Denver Adobe Camp. Lastly, Marc Thiele reviewed various Adobe related events in Germany. It was great to meet and network with so many community managers.

WOW Summit (Sunday, Oct. 4) – core WOW members met to discuss numerous initiatives and plans for the next year. Our focus will continue to be on education. We reviewed our educational efforts so far and discussed progress within the last year on various initiatives. One main outcome of this meeting is that we will continue updating our student learning outcome documents along with a review of developed objectives and career pathways for aspiring web professionals.

Adobe Educator’s Reception (Sunday, Oct. 4) – approximately 200 people attended this event. This was held at the Figueroa Hotel (Tangiers Room). A number of educational initiatives were showcased. Individuals involved in many of these projects were available to demonstrate and answer questions. I got a lot of great ideas from this event.

Los Angeles Web Professionals Adobe User Group (Monday, Oct. 5) – Michael Bierman and I were the key presenters at this event. Michael spoke on the Nokia Web Runtime and their Dreamweaver extension. He demonstrated how one can build a widget for various Nokia phones using only knowledge of web technologies (such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). The market for mobile widgets is growing and he also reviewed various ways to monetize developed applications. I then spoke on the use of CSS within Dreamweaver CS4 and touched on CSS3 and HTML 5 (including many of the new elements and attributes that are presently defined in the evolving HTML 5 recommendation. Thanks to Nokia for providing the food for this event. WOW also provided selected books as prizes to some of the meeting participants.

Lynda.com Educational Advisory Board (Tuesday, Oct. 6) – roughly 25 people were present at this kickoff event. Laurie did a great job of identifying key individuals from throughout the U.S. representing a number of disparate disciplines and backgrounds. We should all be able to provide significant suggestions to help improve the offerings of Lynda.com. Numerous items were discussed (obviously, I can not share the details in this space).

AdobeMAX (Monday – Wednesday) - approximately 4,000 people attended this event. I will provide a separate post on this event.

As you may surmise from these notes, I gathered a significant amount of information. Those who wish to discuss my experiences (and learn more) are encouraged to contact me.

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Monday, October 5 was the first full day for AdobeMAX. The keynote started late and ran over about an hour. The rest of the day all the sessions and labs were off on their starting times. Sigh. Overall, a lot of great material was covered today. We also got a sneak peak at a new movie (Avatar) which has been created using Adobe products. It is in 3D (you will see a few photos of some of us wearing 3D glasses).

After the day sessions, Bill and I visited the Los Angeles Web Professionals Adobe User Group. Although they normally meet on Thursday night, the moved their meeting to Monday night. Michael Bierman presented on Nokia WRT (and how to make widgets in Dreamweaver). Sidebar – Michael lead the team that developed the Adobe SVG Player browser plug-in in the early part of this decade. After Michael’s talk, we took a break and I then presented on new features in HTML 5 and CSS 3 and gave an overview of some of the ways to work with CSS using Dreamweaver CS 4. I also covered topics like specificity to the group. I believe our presentations were well received as we had a number of questions and positive comments form the group.

I plan to post a summary of the entire week separately. In the interim, enjoy these photos.

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Most of Sunday was spent in several different meetings. Since I started an Adobe User Group in January, I participated in the Adobe Community Manager meeting. I had to exit from that meeting after lunch to participate in a WOW Advisory board meeting in the afternoon. Finally, there was a reception for educators at the Figuero Hotel in the evening. Overall, a very productive first day (pre-conference). Here are a few photos. Hope you enjoy. I did not have a lot of time to tag them or place detailed descriptions.

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The first Illinois Web Accessibility Conference was held on Sept. 29, 2009 in Urbana. Victor Tsaran (Senior Accessibility Program Manager, Yahoo!) gave the keynote. One of the main points of his presentation was that for individuals without disabilities, using technology is an option; for those who have disabilities, it makes their lives much more meaningful. This helped stress the importance of web accessibility. Victor also discussed several issues many web designers and developers must face. These include: 1) a desire by clients to know the numbers of people impacted before the site is built. This is akin to asking the same question before deciding to place all items on only the high shelves in a super market. We should focus on how people use the accessibility features of a site. 2) Clients also think accessibility is hard to implement. This is true in some cases, but in many, it is a relatively simple matter (consider alternate text on meaningful images). 3) Many think accessibility features will distort their beautiful design. This can be avoided through use of CSS for the most part. 4) Many also think they need to comply with every guideline (get your site to validate first, for example). Guidelines are there to keep you on the right track.

I attended a session by Mike Scott (Illinois Department of Human Services) who discussed the Illinois Information Technologies Accessibility Act. He covered the fundamentals of both accessibility and usability. Mike indicated there is now the possibility to receive IITAA certification. I also attended a panel discussion on web accessibility and usability (which complemented Mike’s discussion). The panel participants provided a number of resources and links that can help in the process. I found it interesting that many of the resources (books and web sites) are the same ones I use in the CMWEB 150 class.

After lunch, I attended a panel discussion on what makes a presentation accessible. A number of extensions were discussed. The final presentation of the day dealt with Adobe Flash Accessibility. Many features were discussed that one can use to make Flash (and Flex) applications more accessible. Tools for captioning video were also discussed.

Overall, this was a great one day conference. Well worth the cost of admission (both the registration fee and windshield time). Many of the items discussed in our courses were reinforced and several new concepts were obtained (which I will be incorporating into my CMWEB classes).

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We met with the public at the Hunter Museum of American Art on August 6. The event was well attended by members of business and industry as well as numerous educators from Chattanooga, Atlanta, and surrounding communities. These are some of the snapshots taken during this time. I did ask if it was permissible to take photos in the gallery and post them on the web and was told to go for it.

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Members of various organizations (Adobe, Opera, WOW, AIGA, WaSP and Interact, to name a few) met to discuss the current state of web education and what can be done to improve opportunities for the profession and for aspiring professionals. We spent the majority of 3 days covering a multitude of topics and developing a set of action plans to pursue. These are some of the photos from that meeting.

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Our meetings in Chattanooga were held on the Delta Queen river boat. This craft was created in the 1920’s. It was a wonderful juxtaposition to discuss the future of web education in such a location. Here are a number of snapshots of the Delta Queen. I will be adding more photos and discussion over the next few days.

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