So I have decided that I do all my best blogging at the airport, especially waiting for the plane at the gate. Great people watching, and the end of a vacation is always a very pensive thing for me. So as I sit at the gate for my flight home from Boston and the 9th Sakai Conference, I have the appropriate time to pause and reflect on things.

First off…notice the change yet? I migrated everything to WordPressMU from Drupal. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I am not a Drupal fan, but I honestly just don’t have the time and energy to maintain it anymore: upgrade, patch, upgrade, patch. My old webhost didn’t support PHP5 unless I started up an entirely new plan, so I just decided to bail. Plus we are playing with WPMU at work, so I felt I should live in it a little bit.

But I digress…

The Sakai conference was very enlightening. It was fun to go and actually not present, though a few attendees remembered my presentations from 1.5 years ago in Newport, which was awesome. I got a chance to dig into the concept of ePortfolios and OSP more, and explore some of the alternatives out there. We are exploring WPMU for some of the presentation layer functions, based on the goodness I have been reading at WPMUed.

God I want a cheeseburger.

I also spent a lot of time on Twitter at this conference and found out that I was one of the top three twitterers there. Slightly embarassed, but as you know I love twitter and have been finding it very useful as a backchannel for teaching and learning scenarios. I spent a lot of time catching up on some of the excellent Fluid work and new and exciting news about its applications for mobile devices and accessibility. I will have to watch that a bit more. So many of our students use the iPhone and the feedback I keep hearing is that students want more of a “Facebook experience” in Sakai (or even LMSs in general).

I heard more of the dreaded Digital Native chatter too. I got a chance to briefly compare notes with a few other attendees and my contention is that the terms Net-Generation, Gen-Y, and Digital Native/Immigrant are out-moded. This unfairly separates us from our students and puts them in a box. We are all living in a digital world, whether we use the resources or not. If we are consumers, then we have no choice in the matter. I would not consider the students I come in contact with everyday digital natives. They use Facebook and SMS, and not much else really. Throw a blank Wiki at them or ask them to upload a YouTube video and many don’t know what to do. I prefer the term Digital Tourist (CC ND 3.0, Me). We are all just visiting really… It should be our job as ed-tech/educators to filter through new tools, whether they live in our LMS or not, and help people understand their value. Who knows if Twitter or Facebook will be around in 5 years, 10 years…but the concept of sharing, digital literacy, and utilizing collaborative resources tools will still be there because of the trends in ownership that Web 2.0+ has started. Along with this we need to be cognizant of the proliferation of mobile devices, alternative devices, accessibility for everyone, and lowering the bar to “digital entry” for users that might be more touristy than we are.

Long story short, we need to be aware of these trends and play catch up in our professional lives to meet the needs (and demoands) of our audience. For those that are interested, here are some links for learning more about what happened at Sakai ’09:

• Sakai Conference 2009 main page and presentations
• Sakai 2009 Twitter stream

And so once again the holidays are upon us. 2007 has been a stressful in both our work and personal lives. Dear friends of ours are moving away, we have met up with new old friends this year, and have been adjusting to life back in the land of the living.

This year finished off with a very busy last couple of months. I completed almost the first half of my online masters program at University of Illinois…just in time to see the first football team of my collegiate career go on to the Rose Bowl to (hopefully) trounce the Trojans of USC this New Year’s…Go Illini!. At the same time I gave presentations at Educause and the 8th Sakai Conference with CampusEAI on our roll-out of Sakai at FIDM. There were a lot of lessons learned during the deployment and changeover to an entirely new LMS system, and these presentations we a great opportunity to share what we learned along the way. I met a lot of great people along the way too.

So why blog about this? I don’t know. It’s my blog and I can do what I want. It’s just been busy for me, overwhelming at times, but I hope 2008 will give me more time to wind down and keep going with work as usual

Sooo…yeah…hi there…um (shifty eyes) come here often?

I am in Eugene, Oregon right now. Did you know Eugene is the Anarchist capital of the United States? It is. I think it is because there is simply nothing much to do other than check out the scenery or drink We saw a mud person too! No, that is not a hate term, it is an anarchist thing. Geez, I want to go home.

Links for the week after the jump.. >>

• Hula renaissance
• Corporate web standards
• FIDM selects CampusEAI to host Sakai installation
• Peanuts characters as manga
• Building Blocks for Technology Integration: A Strategy…
• 50(+) Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story (or 50 ways to…
• Palmercash
• Weirdomatic’s collection of odd vintage ads
• Futuristic cars from fifty years ago
• Dudeism [Digital Daily]

I am broiling, well maybe not anymore as I am in the hotel room, but still. Things shouldn’t get this hot. Al Gore, save me.

The wife loves Vegas, and I don’t really care for it. It’s like one gaudy overgrown amusement park. It is getting better for me though, and I have grown to appreciate it a little more every time. I got to see Spam-a-lot last night and that was a blast. Diana wasn’t too into it though, since she wasn’t a fan of Monty Python. But she stuck through it, I love her for it.

Today, we plan to stay indoors, hydrate, spend some “alone-time” together, and shop mostly.

The view, did you see the view up there?? Wow! Tonight is the 4th of July and I am going to try to snap some fireworks with my crappy camera (which you can plainly see in my beautiful scenery shot above) I will try to update the blog with the fireworks shots if I get any good ones.

I need this vacation. I just finished my big school project and have been stuck on the computer all-hours the last two weeks, on top of work, on top the “other” work…exhausted. Does anyone go to Vegas to rest? I do.

I can’t deal with the casino right now since I can’t breathe down there. After finally kicking smoking for good over a year ago, I totally seized up last night trying to play slots. This woman sat down next to me with an unfiltered and I closed up like an asthmatic kid. She moved though, but there were so many people smoking that it was generally impossible to breathe. Maybe I am oversensitive now.

“Death awaits you with big, sharp, pointy teeth!”

The best part was meeting the ex-drummer from AC/DC, Chris Slade. We tried to take a picture of him, but the camera somehow got put into movie mode. We must have looked crazy, four overgrown kids, with a six and a three year old tagging along screaming at each other in front of this poor guy signing autographs. Whatever, just drama I don’t need to share here.

Next Di and I went to Hawaii to our lovely little Kauai condo. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. If you know anything about me, you know that we loooove Hawaii. Kauai in particular. It is in that nice pristine state right now, before it gets overrun with timeshares and resorts. I love all of the islands, but especially the ones where you have to watch out for chickens in the road still. It was great to overwind. After about a week, we hopped over to Oahu to get some love at the Kahala and gradually reintroduce to civilization before heading back to the grind.

It was only my second time there … ever. So we took in the sites, Rockefeller Center, NYU Medical Center to visit Didibutt for a kidney party, and then Di’s favorite Jeckyll and Hyde’s!

Looking forward to returning when it isn’t so damn cold. It was about -10 with the windchill.

Check out Playa-monster in the attached flick…patiently waiting for her Daddy TrickyP to come home.