Down under, over and out

Well, here I am, downunder in Brisbane - in the so-called sunshine state of Australia, soaking up ... the rain. Just like England in the Spring then. I feel very at home here, because Brisbane has been suffering record downfalls of rain in the last two days, but it looks like easing off and returning to normal by the end of the week.

I'm here in the Gold Coast of Australia to participate in the IFIP World Computer Congress, which is being held in the Convention Centre. It's a four day event and as usual, attracts delegates from every corner of the world. Most are IT professionals of one kind or another, software engineers, computer scientists, hardware specialists and our lot - the experts in pedagogy. Technical Committee 3 or TC3 of IFIP is the education committee, and it has several sub committees or working groups (with me so far?). I'm the chair of IFIP WG 3.6 (Distance Education) which boasts around 80 members worldwide.

The Learn IT strand of the conference - Key Competencies of the Knowledge Society (hashtag is #kcks2010) - is running for 4 days parallel to the rest of the event, which in total has about 16 parallel streams of conferences. It's massive. The convention hall itself is immense and as I sit here writing this, I can see about 100 metres in each direction - that's just the mezzanine foyer. The main one downstairs is even larger.

Today we are in Day 2 of the event, and I'm looking forward to a keynote speech from the former Vice Chancellor of the Open University, Sir John Daniel, whom I bumped into in May down in Windhoek, Namibia. He will be speaking about computers for secondary school children, and there will be a discussion panel following, with the title: 'Personalisation of learning - are we there yet?' I'm intrigued to know what they will discuss and decide...

Yesterday went by in a bit of a jet lagged fog to be honest with you. I met several people I know and some I had only met before on Twitter, including Carol Skyring and Steve Hargardon, and had some interesting chats. One of the best moments was listening to one of my Glaswegian colleague speaking in fluent Portuguese to a Brazillian delegate. Whilst eating meat pies. Respect. I managed to keep awake long enough to give my own 2 papers in #kcks2010 at 16.00 local time (having essentially gone without any decent sleep for 48 hours) and people said I presented with a sharp focus and without any signs of tiredness. That's adrenaline for you. Either that, or the audience was also jetlagged. Today, after a splendid breakfast at the Rydges Hotel, connected to the conventional hall, I feel a lot more human and ready to face the day ahead. I will blog more from the event as things unfold.

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Down under, over and out by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.