Long time no post. I’ve been over to the UK to talk with the fine folks at JISC, one week back home and am now at the CADE/AMTEC conference. That stands for “Canadian association of distance Education/Association for media and technology in Education.” i got in last night and am currently huddled in the back of the room for the keynote address plugged into the wall with my little portable LAN cable. It seems there ‘might’ be wireless connectivity. The four laptops that I’ve seen around the room are struggling to find one… Except for the inestimable Terry Anderson, who has stolen one of the other wall plugs. 🙂
Funny thing about that. I was talking to several people who seemed to think that writing during someone’s presentation was not very polite. I was just told that someone is off to fix the wireless… YAY.
“Will the cannon be made up of articles distributed over the internet or a number of blogs that have taken the people’s imagination.” Emoke Szathmáry
I wonder about the difference implied in an article somehow published over the internet… but i suppose this is part of the transition that people are starting to understand. I’m not entirely sure that we need ONE cannon to replace the old one. I’m sorta hoping that we can do away with cannons as we move forward.
I do agree with her last comment. It is different coming to a conference in person. No matter how many webcasts I do, they do actually ‘replace’ face to face connection. They are far more efficient, and I learn more during webcasts, but people’s faces are still very nice to see.
I met some neat people last night, had some very nice conversation over beer. Nice to be sitting at a table with a computer scientist and a pure educator arguing about edtech. The CS person was arguing that the future is really a more diversified searching infrastructure. That we really need to get image/video/audio searching worked out. So that, for instance, you could search for images with an image. I’d like to have that too.
Time for the keynote. Derrek de Kerckhove
“Why should i go to school to interupt my education?”
All McLuhan all the time.
“The next medium whatever it is it may be the extension of conciousness will include television as its content, not as its environment and will transform telelvision into an art form. etc… library irrelevant etc…” 1962
and now more quotes. Giantly long quotes on the front screen of a room filled with… oh… 500 hundred people. Hard to say that you understand how the medium controls the message when you are showing me graphs i can’t ^%$&^ read to support your presenation. Charts and graphs that i can’t read. Medium is the message. 🙂
the presentation just CRASHED. They shut off the screen and people are milling… I’ll post… Can’t. Take. It. Any. More.
No backchannel, no conversation, no interest (IMHO)
nifty. are we really still talking about McLuhan? i think even McLuhan would have moved on from pure reliance on graphs and static visuals for mass communication by now, wha’?
maybe, even, included some room for doing more than sitting like meat in chairs and staring agog at the screen?
i suppose it’s hard to frig too much with people’s expectations for what many still perceive as an academic conference, but…even backchannels would be a start. an empty invitation to the three of you who brought your LAN cables to blog would at least show spirit. jolly good times.
yada, yada … enough about your lan cable … what about my future?!?!