This morning I woke up early so here I am all on my lonesome with my ‘I’m blogging it” T-shirt and no one else here to suck my bandwidth- YAY.
I wrote this last night after a good night out!!
Today was marred yet again by a lack of connectivity but enriched by the number of new friendships made. I got up real early as the people in the next motel unit did as well!! I thought I would walk down to the Events Centre early but turned back because of the drizzle. Jedd was in the same predicament so we decided to get a taxi. While we were waiting Jedd introduced me to a Richard, a lovely man with a voice like Sir Ken Robinson. Talking of voice Richard is keynoting on Friday so it was nice to be able to chat for a while- I didn’t realise that Richard had done the TUANZ circuit a couple of years back so he knows how things are in NZ.
Getting there nice and early I got my blog posted at the Bloggers’ Cafe before the bandwidth robbers turned up and started sucking my connectivity while they checked their emails. First up was keynote, Julia Atkin, who unfortunately lost me a bit there in the middle but summed up nicely at the end when she asked “What is learning?” and suggested that learning is…
a journey
a growth
constructing and deconstructing
creating and recreating
transformative
enlightening
empowering
enriching
Learning is organic, dynamic and responsive. Jeremy asked yesterday, “What do we know about learning?”
My first breakout after that was with @suziea – Lessons learnt as a facilitator. Suzie was so generous to us all talking about her role as facilitator in Petone and sharing her wiki frenzy of resources and giving us all a DVD of some of her best used resources- awesome Suzie. Thank you.
On the way back to the main venue from the concert chamber I cadged a lift with a lovely young lady from Insite who gave me a lift- bless her. She later made my day by gifting me this very way cool see through mouse from Insite that lights up in a range of florescent colours. It was a little bling for my little laptop as well.
After a quick spot of face-to-face networking it was off to learn how to animate with Powerpoint- OK but half way through the internet came back on and there was a host of catching up to do- hotmail, twitter, email, bloglines etc so I stopped paying attention really.
Next off to Digital Story Telling with Photostory 3- now this was more like it but I wonder if anyone can tell me a way to convert a .wmv file to something that will upload to Podomatic??????
During afternoon tea I met up with @tonitones, @sarnee and @heymilly. Next time we need the organisers to put our Twitter personas on our name tags. Maybe we should add our avatars, blog titles and Second Life entities so we know who we are when we bump into Scrumples or Jojash!
After one too many red wines at the after-match function we ended up in a motel room surrounded by CORE- they were swarming. They were all very welcoming and the company convivial but we ended up having a lovely meal at a Thai restaurant before a wander home in the cool of the evening.
Looking forward tomorrow to the homegroup meeting with my cluster leader, 11:15 live blogging with @dragon09 using yesterday’s link to the bling blog, a session on action research which I am really looking forward to knowing more about and the big party in the evening.
I agree with the name badges!
So funny introducing yourself with your first name to recieve blank looks until
you state your avatar!
Nice to meet up with you yesterday too 🙂
Cool photo – my husband said – “so now you know they are actually real people” – he also added “and not crazy internet stalkers” – I said generally those types of people aren’t allowed to become teachers in the first place 🙂
When I first started on Twitter I did feel a bit like a ‘crazy internet stalker’. I guess it was because of the Twitter language; ‘following’and ‘follower’. Bit scary really.
It’s great to be able to see my fellow twitterers in picture form if nothing else. I am really enjoying reading all your feedback about L@S – almost as good as being there – thank you so much for sharing your new learning, reflections and experiences with us. I wish I was there with you all. I totally agree with you about the name tags 😉 I checked out a replay of your live blogging from Simon’s break out (I couldn’t get online at the time) – there were a couple of points raised that got me thinking – so thanks for making that available as well. Hope you all enjoy the dinner tonight. Have fun.
Hope you are all having a good time. I wish I was there. Say hello to Julia for me :). Do they have a segway this year?
I thought podomatic handled the conversion itself from wmv to whatever will play? Have a look at georgia.podomatic.com this is my 8 year old’s podcast. She has three movies on it. One is a clayanimation she made herself and one we made together. The other is a pivot animation. All of these were made using windows movie maker and just uploaded to podomatic. Any file conversion was handled by them. Have you tried it recently? Things may have changed cause we did those a while ago but they certainly worked. Alternatively upload to teachertube and then paste a link into podomatic. Not quite as nice but it does work.
Great post Allanah – you really bring the whole conference experience to life for those of us who are not there. Have a fun party tonight 🙂
Thanks for the feedback folks. Unfortunately watching from afar is not the same as being there. Can’t wait now for ULearn- with Sheryl and Will- it will be fabulous. The Bloggers’ Cafe will be humming then.
Paul- Georgia’s podcasts are really great- she sounds like a very confident young lady.
I was particularly interested in Podomatic being able to convert .wmv files- a file made in Photostory so it runs pictures as well as audio. Miguel has offered Visual Hub which allows conversion on a Mac but I want a PC alternative- from .wmv to .mp4