It looks like it'll be another busy Spring for conference presentations for me this year.

I'm honored to have been selected to speak at cf.Objective() this year. I've always enjoyed the conference, and found the speakers to be high-quality and the actionable information I take away from the conference even better. I'll be talking about making high-performance caching easy with ColdFusion. The session focuses on using Ehcache (or any memory-based cache) to significantly improve application performance by caching the right data for your application's use. This is another iteration of the presentation I gave at NCDevCon and the CF Unconference at Adobe MAX last year, but with the guidance of the excellent conference advisory board for cf.Objective(), I've added some key points I had previously missed.

I'll also be speaking at UBTech on a different topic in a different field. In the past year, I've given the "Unleash Your Inner Spielberg" talk at a number of conferences and to different groups across the country. I've really enjoyed doing this talk, and it's evolved a lot a long the way. The team from UBTech called me up late last year to let me know that my session on this topic was one of the highest rated at the conference last year (formerly EduComm). They wanted me to come to this year's conference, but talk about the things I've learned while giving this talk. As such, the title for the presentation this year is "Unleash Your Inner Spielberg When Creating Online Lectures, Part 2, The Director's Cut." It's going to be challenging sifting through three hours of material to get it down to 35 minutes for the UBTech presentation, but relentless editing is a very good challenge to face once in a while.

I'm a bit disappointed that I won't be able to make it to the Open CF Summit this year. It's a really interesting conference, and they've lined up some very interesting speakers and partners. The sessions are really geared to hands-on, practical integration solutions between CFML and lots of different services and environments. It's also incredibly affordable, at $72 for registration. Maybe next year!

I've had the privilege of speaking at technical and educational conferences for more than a decade. At the turn of the century (it really wasn't that long ago), I was speaking on using streaming media in higher education, and even did a session on the first release of the Flash Media Server at conferences like Syllabus (back before it became the Campus Technology conference).

There was, alas, a long, dry spell for me in speaking at conferences for the past five years. That dry spell recently came to an end, in a big way.

In the last year, I've spoken at Adobe's Education Summit at MAX, CUE 2011, and Educomm 2011. I also recently spoke as part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology's speaker series, giving a variation on the same talk that I gave at some of the other conferences: "Unleash Your Inner Spielberg When Presenting (Online) Lectures."

There are a lot of ways to present information in PowerPoint-style presentations. Most of them don't facilitate information dissemination and cognitive flow. My presentation focuses on using techniques from both film and the stage to help make presentations more engaging and increase learner information retention.

I'm pretty happy with how the presentation has turned out over its various iterations. It's been great for me to get back into the hard work of presenting, refining a presentation, and tuning it for the appropriate current audience.

A recording of the latest iteration of this presentation can be found on the Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology's web events site.

For those of you who wanted my slides from my presentation at NCDevCon — Improving Application Performance with 3 Simple Functions — they're attached to this post. As usual, I learned a lot about what would work and would not work while practicing this presentation, and was making changes just an hour before showtime. I received some good feedback from a couple of people in the session as well, and wanted to extend my thanks to everyone who attended the session,

NCDevCon has turned out to be a really good conference with a number of interesting sessions. A couple of sessions that I wanted to see are running concurrently, which is bad for me but, I think, always the sign of a good conference!