Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Today is the first day of Educause 2007 with open tracks. It was a long day. Maybe due to the high attendance, two of the presentations I originally planned to attend were maxed out. The annoying thing is we didn’t even get the chance to stand at the back of the room. Instead, all people who couldn’t have a seat got kicked out of the room by the convention centre staff! A few participants were kinda pissed off right on spot. I heard someone argued that if he could sit on the floor, and got kicked out too. I think this is a bit harsh for an educational conference.

Anyway, I ended up in a few great sessions anyway. Mark P. McCahill and Bob Price gave a great session with some innovative ideas around tagging rich media elements on the web without boundary. The exhibition hall is (are) huge, much bigger than last year’s I think. I tried the relaxation stations (massage) in between the halls, it felt great.

At the end of the day I managed to rush to a bird of feather session on Open Source development after attending the poster session. I put in a few cents:
- Open source tools vs Free Services vs Traditional Shrink Wrapped software (Open Office Vs Google Doc Vs Microsoft Office)
- Declare Apache Licence instead GPL may help to build a larger user/developer community when creating Open Source tools.
It was nice to see Mike Reese there too.

Later at night, I had a chance to check out the music project space at the Seattle Science Fiction Museum with our Dutch friends. It’s right underneath the needle tower and an extremely funky building! The sky train ride straight into it on the SF side. I accidentally walked into the wrong entrance where Google was throwing Halloween Party. Let’s just say I got to see some “funky” Google characteristics…  A long but resourceful day!