As I sit here in my hotel room, in the last calm minutes before TelEd 94 in Albuquerque, I notice that most of the key questions presented in the outline of the K12 Internet book I'm writing are on the agenda of this conference. And even before my plane rolled up to the gate, the people who have decided to come here make for a "coincidence" every moment.
Already, I've seen Jay Pfaffman, who manages the Unix machine on which the CoSN gopher lives, and thanked him for his efforts yesterday to create a training area for tomorrow's workshop. Meantime, I got a phone call in my room from Don Perkins, who leaves Houston tomorrow at 5:30 AM in order to coteach with me a Gopher Grower's Workshop, informing me that he's managed to create 25 guest accounts for our workshop members to try their hand at what we're preaching. This might even work!
All of this has been done online, and in a few hours we'll all be together for a few days. The power of these sessions can only be compared to the tribal gatherings, one of which will take place a few miles from here on Saturday, as Native Americans celebrate the Corn Dance. Our celebration of Global Telecommunications is quite different, until you realize that we too celebrate the "Four Directions" in our own way, and that everything (electrons, plastic, copper wire, even fiber) is natural at some level, and capable of providing expression to what ever spirits we choose to indulge.
The conference starts tomorrow, with a bevy of half day and full day workshop sessions. Naturally, all of the ones I'd like to attend happen while I'm conducting mine, but small matter, there is a rich life to be had between and after sessions. The ground paving that's been done over months and years of online exchange creates a quantum leap that is difficult to understand until you've experienced it yourself: when you finally meet people whom you've only "known" online the surprise is that you already *know* them, in a deeper way than most of the people you work with everyday, I'll wager. Tomorrow alone there are more than a dozen workshop sessions by leaders in the field, and the first thing to get over is that you'll never see all of it.
For me, now, I'm about to jump on a shuttle bus over to Old Town, to see what's shaking, and get some real Mexican food ( a rarity, if not impossibility, back East)
So much for intentions...as it turned out, Old Town closed up at 7 and while sitting in the lobby, the movers and shakers of the Internet world started breezing in. First, Frank Odasz, the BigSky guy, whom I've not seen since July, sat with me before going off to a series of meetings on his Reach for the Sky project, and we immediately fell into brainstorming collaborations that seem natural. One by one, Kathy Rutkowski, creator of NetTeach news, Chip Daley and Judi Steele of Las Vegas (whom I met for the first time) joined the circle, and we discovered incredible parallels and potentials for advancing mutual goals. As we share a quick snack in the hotel, I'm convinced that the conference hasn't even started, and magic is happening.
Mon, 14 Nov 1994
Ferdi Serim
Princeton Regional Schools
Computer Teacher/ District Computer Coordinator
ferdi_serim@monet.prs.k12.nj.us (school) phone: 609 683-4699
ferdi@cosn.org (Consortium for School Networking)
"When you're a dreamer, who needs to sleep?"