Meeting the team at CDTL07

I’ve had the pleasure in the last few days to meet my coworkers in person for the first time. It is one of the oddities of telecommuting that you can build relationships with people over the course of months and never get to meet them face to face. We’ve shared pictures, so we knew what we looked like, but it’s still nice to get to see people face to face. I really enjoyed just being able to hang out with them all too; making those connections with people about what we do outside of work is fun.

The conference we attended together is the Conference for Distance Teaching and Learning in Madison, WI. I have notes from a number of presentations that I’m hoping to post at some point in the next week. I attended several valuable workshops covering topics such as using social networking applications in education and managing the development of Flash games. I saw a great demonstration of a scenario-based course with lots of real-world applications that I want to try to imitate in some of my own development. A few of the workshops were disappointing, mostly because I think the conference as a whole was more geared towards faculty and administrators in higher ed rather than designers and developers. That isn’t a bad thing, of course, it just wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. Of course, some of that is simply that I picked poorly for some of the workshops I chose to attend, and I should have walked out of a few when I knew they weren’t what I was looking for. That’s a learning experience in and of itself though.

More conference notes will be posted in the next few days.

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