February+2012

Thursday, February 9th, 2012.
Today was [|TEDxManitoba] Day. 100 of us were invited to be the live audience at the MTC Warehouse Theatre in downtown Winnipeg, and I think that everybody thoroughly enjoyed the day.

Then again, maybe "enjoyed" is the wrong word. TED talks (and their TEDx cousins) are inspiring, motivating, and thought provoking. For those who don't mind a bit of intellectual provocation, it certainly was a fantastic event.

What strikes me the most as I write this an hour after the close of the event is the wide variety of viewpoints, philosophies and life situations that were presented in the talks. Manitoba is a diverse place. Nice to see the private sector pitch in with generous sponsorships. Nice to see that the million+ of us in this Province together have the capacity to pull off such a high quality event, and to offer it to participants without a ticket price. How very social and inclusive, and Manitoban.

In fact, the event was nice. People lined up for lunch and for a treat at the break. We were a polite, and maybe even a bit of a reserved audience at times. We were social. Break times and the lunch hour provided ample opportunity to meet new people, and to solve the mystery about why or how each of us had come to be in the room. The break times seemed to have an air of fascination and generosity- people with big ideas ready to share with other big idea types.

I think I'll marinate in the ideas for a while before I really know what kind of an impact the day has had, is having, and will have on me. I know already that the entire organizing committee ought to be proud of hosting such a top notch event.

Thanks, and (ahem), any chance I can come back next year? Please?

Friday, February 24th
Today I drove out to Portage La Prairie, about 80 km from home, to present at the [|Byte 2012 conference]. A couple of months ago I applied to see if they'd like to hear a bit about the student-owned-device pilot that we are running at Dakota, and they said that'd be a fine thing to hear at the conference. I made sure it was ok with my employer first, since our pilot is still pretty new, and so we are being careful about how much we "show & tell" about it right now.

I'd post my slides here, but the slideshow got really big (22MB) since I didn't reduce any of the photo sizes, and because of the way I set up the PowerPoint. However, I might figure out a way to split it into a couple of shorter shows or at least post a summary sometime int the near future.

**//Updated March 3.//** Ok, so I split the slide show into half and posted it here. If I was a bit more savvy I'd upload the whole enchilada to [|slideshare], but this works for now. Here is the first half of the slideshow and here is the second half.

One thing that may become apparent from viewing my slides is that //I don't really know that much about how to use PowerPoint//. If anyone reading this cares to take pity on me and can point me to a good tutorial other than "[|You Suck at PowerPoint]", that'd be nice.

The afternoon sessions (after I presented, which went well) I spent with [|Darren Kuropatwa], who took us through an exercise in developing a "textured" PLN. The idea being that Twitter is a start, but if that's it,then there is more work to be done. Darren's session was fun, and I learned about a few things that were new to me, including [|compfight] and [|picnik]. It was a good session! Anyone looking for a good tech conference in Manitoba in the middle of winter ought to check out Byte.