order / disorder

Well no tweets from #herdsa. Why? Because there’s no freely available internet access in the conference rooms. We have broadband in the hotel rooms that works out at about $40 per hour; or we can pay for wireless in the conference lobby, but that doesn’t extend to the 9 different rooms that the conference is happening in. I don’t want to sound too cynical, but what the hell! I know that it’s not just me who feels that this is a significant oversight by the organisers.

Some folks who complained were told that this was a teaching and learning conference and not an elearning conference so what was the beef? Remember that people working in eLearning will continually be told that ‘eLearning is just part of Learning and Teaching”!

The fact that we are nearly a tenth of the way through the 21^st century seemed to cause no concern that a major conference in this country was not engaging with the landscape of learning and the range of tools that some of its attendees and presenters use in their everyday lives. The major theme of the conference is Engaging Communities and many of us felt that the eLearning community was being disengaged …

Tweets are just an example. There was live blogging, fact checking, research, etc, etc that folks wanted to do but couldn’t. And the thing that is ironic is that much of the live stuff was intended to share and engage with colleagues who couldn’t attend the conference. Several presenters giving papers with an eLearning or mlearning theme also complained that they had no internet access.

Are my expectations too high? Should I accept statements that “New Zealand is 5 years behind the rest of the world and that’s the way it is”? I hope not but I’m interested to know if you agree or disagree.

HERDSA’s wiki