After a white knuckle sled ride on 81N yesterday afternoon, I did make it home from three days of the PETE&C geek-fest. My presentation on Second Life went well and I send out big cudos to my ‘virtual’ friends Kathy Schrock, Kevin Jarrett, Joe Sanchez and Leslie Jarmon for contributing to my talk on the implications of SL on developing learning communities and the future of distance education. Thanks to those folks we were able to provide a really good demonstration of how real-world connections can be made and fostered within SL. Generated a lot of discussion and excitement I think. Session notes can be found here.

I wasn’t able to get notes posted about Steve Dembo’s keynote yesterday. He gave a great talk and if I have time later, I’ll summarize my written notes on here. Until then, Kristin Hokanson over at The Connected Classroom recorded the presentation. Hope I’m not taking any liberties by reposting it here.

I should mention one thing that I took away from Monday’s Keynote by David Pogue. Two words - SKYPE PHONE! Chris and I played with Skype on our Verizon XV6700’s today. We are both running the WM6 ROM hack on these devices. We downloaded the CAB files and installed with no trouble. Minutes later we were connected to our wireless network chatting over the internet from our cell phones. (Note that the XV6700 are wifi enabled) I should also mention that we then used the BT Audio program to force feed the audio to our bluetooth earpieces. Extremely simple and works well. This will definately get me to use Skype more often.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 3:36 pm and is filed under news, Second Life, social discourse, Educational Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.