Comcast is the dominant provider of Internet service to households in many markets across America. When I first moved to Chicago, it was the provider we went with as well. Back in Minnesota, we were working to move away from it due to a little glitch they had where households in the Twin Cities were, at times, unable to access the Web sites for the college I worked for.

It took months of conversations and a good number of angry students and parents to get the situation resolved.

I like watching certain TV programs with the captions on, which strikes non-family members as odd. After all, I’m not hard of hearing, I don’t have an auditory processing disorder, and English is my native language. But I did grow up in an immigrant household where my parents relied on captions to understand what was going on while they watched TV. I didn’t need captions the way my parents did, but they added to my enjoyment of television shows by turning them into animated books. I loved to see the words on the screen; to me, they offered a typographic translation of the sound. My relationship with television evolved into something not only visual and auditory, but also textual. It turns out that I’m not alone in this among so-called “normal” people.

Ironic that those of us in the trenches of online learning—instructional designers, flash developers, leading-edge online instructors and administrators—enjoy a face-to-face gathering periodically. Just this past week, some eighteen of us from DePaul found ourselves at the 24th annual Distance Learning Conference sponsored by the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

For me, the three keynote addresses tied the conference together: Curtis Bonk (known as Curt once you’ve shared a drink with him) charged the group with his ever-present enthusiasm for all things online. Those of us from DePaul were delighted to find that Curt—who is the pure definition of a “connector” personality type—now includes in his presentation a reference to and photo of our own James Moore’s blog about the Pulse electronic writing tool. And here is James’ blog about that event.

I gave a presentation at the New Media Consortium conference back in June on a slew of web 2.0 video and slideshow tools I’ve been testing. The idea for the presentation began nearly a year ago when I was frustrated with the growing divide between the amount of foreign-language media available on the web and the number of teachers taking advantage of it. Initially, I thought the presentation would focus largely on JumpCut.com, a site that offers a fairly robust, web-based video editor. Users can upload video, audio, and images to their JumpCut accounts, then use the editor to create short movies.