Well, I am currently at the 2005 PIDT conference (Professors of Instructional Design Technology) in Estes Park, Colorado. This is really what a conference should be, in my opinion. There is no schedule -- the concurrent sessions are decided on the fly as people decide they want to group together to discuss certain issues. We're also spending about half of the time hiking, horseback riding, swimming, and just getting to know one another.
OK, maybe structured, organized conferences are useful too, but there is some benefit in an informal arrangement like PIDT. How many of us have been at other conferences and when the speaker didn't show, we just circled the chairs and talked about the topic at hand and left feeling that was the best session of the day?
The theme of PIDT this year, being the 20th anniversary of the conference, is looking back and looking forward in the field. The guests of honor are the legendary Don Ely and Tom Schwinn. I'm excited to hear them live!
I'm also excited to be here together with Sandie Waters from USU and Sanghoon Park from FSU. We're working together on a project doing case studies of students about their first year in an IT department. Even though we've been working together through email and the like, I have never actually met Sanghoon, so it was great to visit with him the last couple of days--I wish I had met him earlier, he is an outstanding person and scholar!
Anyway, sorry to disappoint, but I'm not going to blog this conference too much. We're here to socialize, discuss, and work on projects together, so I'm going to try and cut myself loose from the computer most of the weekend. Oh, yeah, and the wireless is unreliable in our lodge ... that may have something to do with it as well ... :-)
But for a fuller recap, go to http://scottadams.blogs.com/, or look for the Flickr tags about PIDT.
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