Day 2

Traveled from Jasper to Edmonton today to meet with Cathy King VC RLN Provincial Coordinator for Alberta.
Looking forward to this meeting will let you know how it goes.
What an awesome trip through the Canadian Rockies wow breathtaking.
Day 2 of the conference was as good as the first day in Bannf.
One quote I liked was
"If technology doesn't work for people it doesn't work" Simple but true.
I went to two sessions on 2nd life and how it is being used with tertiary organisations as well as the journey they went through.
In summary it was the fact they tried to recreate the physical world of their organisation into the virtual world and it didn't work.
I guess the lesson here is create a dynamic environment that grows around sustainability.
As I have mentioned before I am redeveloping the VLN (Virtual Learning Network) sitee intial stages and has moved beyond this to other technologies.
I will go into this in another post with my ideas.
The other valuable part of this conference was meeting and talking to Prof Stephen Heppell what a cool guy.
I meet an talked to Randy LaBonte and Tim Winklmans from the
So far it had focus on Video Conferencing in the Ministry of Education in British Colombia, A valuable conversation as they are going through some of the same issues we are. They are offering courses that have no start or finish time. Excellent. You can find an outline and a lot of policy docs etc on their site Distance Learning
The other guy I meet up with were Darren Potter the Principal from Keewaytinook Internet High School Balmertown, Ontario, Excellent exchange of ideas and thoughts. Darren works with 1st Nation children in Balmertown, Ontario

The other guy I met was from Niagara Falls he is involved with ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) I will talk about him later.
Where to from here will be in my next posting.