MONDAY
Spend most of the rest of Monday in the house working and checking on the progress of the storms.  New York is very badly hit with a foot of snow.  It quickly became apparent that taking the train down there would be a very bad idea indeed.

Instead I take a flight out of Albany down to Charleston via Charlotte. Bernadette and Aunt Sheila take me out to the airport later on in the day.  V cold.  Traffic heavy.

Flight down to Charlotte is two hours.  Spend most of it talking to the guy next to me – about teaching, children, lucid dreaming, karate, music, conferences, travel, autism, brainwaves, back pain and so on.  V curious by the end of the flight about what he does – turns out he and his family run carnivals out of Orlando but mainly based in New York State.  Carnivals.  With rides and games and entertainmnent and livestock shows.

The next flight is delayed by lack of staff. Nothing open anywhere.  V hungry at Charlotte airport.  Onto a crowded tiny jet which seems to take forever to get airborne in a big queue of planes and then takes only 30 minutes to get to Charleston.  Am in the hotel and convention center by 1 a.m.

TUESDAY MORNING – LUNCHTIME


Breakfast in the massive atrium.  Begin to hear buzz around me about iTunes, web two point zero, technology assisted learning (teachers are still needed etc etc).  Yes, I am in an IT in Education conference.

Walk over the Skyway into the center and join a queue to register.  In fact, the IOE hasn’t paid so I am sent along to the “Payments Due” queue.

Ah, Higher Education, endless lessons in the value of self –esteem.  The business manager has seen it all before. She lets me in anyway and I sit down immediately and email home where Neil gets on the case straight away and Gyta from the Knowledge Lab emails the business manager here.


Cannot decide what to do, where to go, what to see, it’s so huge here…See a session advertised with an IOE speaker – someone I’d never heard of.  Joined 10 other people in one of the many meeting rooms listening to someone talking about VLEs.  The IOE speaker wasn’t there.

Eventually run into an old friend in the form of Judith Enrqiquez with her colleague Lin Lin from University fo North Texas.  Have lunch and catch up.  She has, of course, finished her PhD (we knew each other as a gang of four PhD students on an ESRC seminar series on play, creativity and technology about four years ago).  I tell her that I won't be joining the Hawaiian shirt reception later…

Need to tinker with slides etc…