ITC Board Meeting - Annapolis

I just spent three days in Annapolis attending my first board meeting for the Instructional Technology Council (ITC). What a great bunch of people and what a great location to spend a few days getting to know them all a bit better. We spent a fair amount of time planning for the 2008 e-Learning Conference which will be held in St. Pete Beach and hosted by St. Petersburg College. Building upon the incredible momentum of the 2007 conference, I predict that this next conference will once again break attendance records and be a huge success.

I was almost chosen by the group to give my first keynote address at a national conference. Almost, but not quite. This is an opportunity that I am actively preparing for in hopes that I will someday be asked. I have about four different keynote topics in mind right now, some of which are ready for prime time, and others that still need a bit more nurturing and development. A couple of the board members were very supportive of the idea of naming me to be a keynote, and I am very appreciative of their words and efforts.

I will be presenting a pre-conference workshop at e-Learning 2008 based on my Web 2.0 Whirlwind presentation. This will be three hours long and will be offered in the morning session and repeated in the afternoon on the first day of the conference. Pre-conference workshops are always offered on the first day (Saturday) of the ITC e-Learning conference. I love making this presentation and having three hours to do it (twice) will really give people a chance to play around with some of the tools and see just how easy they are to use and how easy they are to integrate into an LMS.

At the D2L conference in Duluth I experimented with a different approach to the whirlwind presentation. All of the presentation materials were laid out in the content and discussions areas of D2L with guest access accounts given to the workshop attendees. This worked well, and I think I can make it work significantly better by refining a few things and developing a few of the examples even more.

While in Annapolis we stayed at the Maryland Inn which is one of the three buildings constituting the Historic Inns of Annapolis. Very cool old buildings with relatively lousy service (staff). It was a great location right on Main Street and within easy walking distance of several crab shacks and an active part of Chesapeake Bay. Yes, I did have various types of crab dishes while I was there, yummy! We also had a special dinner with actors playing the roles of 18th century Marylanders, as well as a guided walking tour of the historic district including the old Maryland State House and the U.S. Naval Academy. We got a lot of work done also, but I’ll save that for a separate post.

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