Monday, September 25, 2006

Belated... but better than never?

SETT
At the entrance,
originally uploaded by DavidDMuir
I spent a good bit of Friday (when I should have been preparing for classes) reading other people's posts from SETT and the TeachMeet. It was interesting comparing notes for sessions I had also blogged, as well as reading about sessions I missed. (Did anybody blog David Weinberger's keynote?) There were a fair number of posts, but while most have been picked up by John Johnston's Tagmix and Hitchhikr, a few seem to have fallen through the net. In particular, Technoratti doesn't seem to have found Ewan's posts - I wonder why?

However, reading all these posts remind me that I've been a bit lax about saying thank you. I've got a few more posts I want to make on SETT and TeachMeet, but thought I should get the belated thanks in first.

Firstly, a huge thank you to Ewan, both for inviting me to co-present at his SETT session (Creating Communities), and for TeachMeet. A special thanks is due for TeachMeet as the idea for the format was his, he set up the wiki and then he did a lot of work behind the scenes to pull it all together. I was a bit cheekier in a previous post where I said the TeachMeet was being put together by a bunch of numpties who were making it up as they went along on a wiki! That was not entirely true. :-) However if it hadn't have been for Ewan, I suspect it would have looked like it was organised by numpties instead of turning out the great success that it was. (More of this in a future post I suspect.)

Other thanks are due to various sponsors that I should have been acknowledging as I went along. Specifically, Stormhoek who provided the wine, Promethean who paid the hotel's corkage charge and also bought some wi-fi access for us, and to LTScotland who paid for our meeting room and also helped out with the wi-fi.

I very much appreciated the wi-fi access. It was a bit slow in the TeachMeet room (we were in the furthest flung corner of the hotel) so I couldn't do the live demo I had planned (I'll say more about this too in a future post) but it worked a treat in the seminars and the exhibition area (...and I suspect I'll say more about wi-fi access in yet another future post!). A final thanks however should go to Scotsys. I had run out of wi-fi credit and was sitting having tea and buns with John Johnston when we noticed the number of wi-fi networks available from exhibitors. Many were locked down, but some appeared to be open. We tried the Scotsys link and were given free access with a good strong signal. I think my Interactive Chatting Teddies post was made on the Scotsys link. :-) I felt a bit guilty about it though, so I went to their stand later and thanked them, however they seemed quite relaxed about it, so thanks again to them. (Perhaps this is a way ahead for next year. If the SECC are still asking funny money for wi-fi, perhaps a number of exhibitors would be willing to open up their wi-fi for public access. Just a thought.)

So, thanks again to everyone mentioned above. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I suspect that both SETT and TeachMeet will feature in my posts for a good wee while to come.


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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi David,
A lot more is picked up by a Technorati search than technorati tags. Unfortunately it is not as simple to get the search as a rss feed which my Tagmix grabs. I am gong to look at using technorati's api rather than rss sometime.
BTW I am tagging with teachmeet06 in CoComment (and del.ico.us), and pull that into the Tagmix. The potential for this sort of expanded conference is huge if we can get the tech right. (going to blog some more about this soon)

David said...

I noticed that you complained about people not tagging co-comment before. I must admit I had always thought of co-comment as tool for me to track my conversations and so have never been too careful about tagging. It had never occurred to me that others might want to track what I was saying, but of course you are right - particularly for something like this. I'll try to do better.

There is however a double irony with this post. 1) Technoratti has failed to index it or pick up the tags (I'll try the changing the time of post trick in a minute) and 2) I can't get the co-comment box to appear for this comment! Odd!