Day 14 - Vancouver BC

wow! - a whole fortnight already..... seems like one long day that I've been away.

No jog this morning - getting myself into conference mode for the STLHE conference. I am in a premium single room at the Gage Towers - which is supposed to be 4 people sharing a space, with 1 bathroom and a common kitchen/lounge. For the past 5 days I've been alone here, but the delegates (about 450!) have now started arriving for the conference and the peace of my solitary hermitage has been shattered! The other 3 guys are all Canadian academics from different parts of the country - I have been very sociable and filled them in on what I know about the campus. One has got a bad cough, but I don't think he is from Toronto (hope not! :)

Spent the morning just working on my presentation for Friday, and then went to a pre-conference workshop in the afternoon. It was really worthwhile. One of the presenters - Brian Lamb from UBC - very keen, young and cutting-edge - spoke a lot about blogs and wikis and their potential in education (something I had been thinking about since starting to work with Moodle and doing this blog). It was also a high-tech hands-on workshop - they had about 10 laptops in a little trolley which they hauled out, and every group then had a wireless link to to the web so we could explore learning 'objects' and so on while they presented. So it just confirmed that a lot of my intuitions about elearning environments are on track (I mean, we've had a wireless network at home for 2 yrs now!) - its just the challenge of making it all work when I get back to NZ and have to deal with resources, politics, etc.

Just got back now from the opening cocktail reception (where we had to buy our drinks - stink ay!) - so I din't stay too long. Met up with an Aussie and a colleague from NZ, so didn't feel so isolated. Full-on conferencing tomorrow so I'll get a relatively early night.

Posted: Wed - June 11, 2003 at 10:48 PM Stan's Travel Blog