Monday Afternoon – Network fun and hallway talk

This afternoon, I was supposed to go to a session talking about girls, Internet use and Turkey (Yavuz Inal,). These all play together in a cultural context. While I was heading over there, I met up with another person that was heading in the same direction and we started talking about the session that we were going to see, the keynote and “The World is Flat” (that book should really be the bible for edtechers and anyone else works with connectivity based enterprises) when we came across someone trying to get connected to the wireless network. It seems that a rouge laptop with an IP address the same as one of the routers messed things up enough that at the end of the day, a pantheon of gods (nee network admins) were all gathered around looking like they had just got put through the ringer – who does god call for help? But in the end it seems to have got going – Kudos to the ibaun guy. Anyway back to the earlier part of the afternoon… so we got distracted with all that and came to the agreement that regardless of the geography, floor or side of desk, culture will be something that creates friction forever. Some of this friction is useful, but once it goes beyond making things a little bit uncomfortable (to get things moving out of ruts) and starts to stop people, then you have problems. By the time this conclusion was arrived at, the session was over and with a good half of the laptop people not able to connect, there were people chatting about the good and bad of no network.

Then I went to the session that I was presiding over. The presentations covered game learning – it show significant results, online collaboration – reflection is key and the effectiveness of Blackboard – students and faculty both like it but with some unexpected results (students prefer hybrid, then traditional and finally distance ed courses and even though they don’t get the training they are supposed to, they find the system useful).

Finally it was time for my session and it went very well with a full room and a good number of questions during and then at the reception later in the evening.