Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

I attended our state technology conference (PETE&C) week. At one of the Sunday night receptions, I won a laptop cart–minus the laptops. Darn! Nevertheless, you can see Ken, Michael, and I got pretty attached to the cart at the party. More pics on Flickr.

I enjoyed Apple’s Dave Marra’s workshop on podcasting with GarageBand. I can’t wait to get started, but that, my friends, looks like a post-D activity. Jim Gates’ tips were cool and I added several of his ideas to my cool new tools wiki.

If you were not lucky enough to be in lovely Hershey, PA this past snowy week, a wiki, created by Bridget Belardi, captures some of the PETE&C excitement.

At the first morning keynote, Kathy Brautigam, Director of the state’s Bureau for Educational Technology, shared this video, an ad for EDS, a tech company–Building an Airplane While it’s Flying. I absolutely felt that was how I worked last week when LearnerBlogs was experiencing off and on tech issues and I was working with three classes to build research blogs.

Actually, I feel like that a lot. Not a problem when you are working with colleagues who also thrive on risk and moderate chaos (and yes, sometimes, big gains).

And now for the D-update: To continue with the old analogy, I’d say I am at about 2 centimeters right now. In two weeks (this has been a long gestation), I should have a sharable draft.  I’ll let you hold it if you like!

The bad news: my committee is too swamped and I cannot get my paper read, revised, and filed by spring graduation. The good news: I should be able to defend on May 7th and I may be able to enjoy a real summer break. Please send all your positive “D vibes” towards the Philly burbs!