Presenting at HighEdWebDev 2005
16 November 05
Last week I went to the HighEdWebDev 2005 conference in Rochester, NY and I had a great time. This was the first conference I had been to, ever. So I didn't really know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they had included all your meals in the relatively small conference registration fee - and the meals were incredibly good too. They had things setup for you to do every night, including renting out the George Eastman House and museum for the night so that we can walk around at our leisure - amply supplied with excellent food, might I add.
What I also loved about the conference was the keynote speaker - Steve Krug. Known in the web developer world as an expert in the field of usability, his keynote had the perfect blend of humor and seriousness. It was to the point and had some nice examples of things he looks for when evaluating sites.
What was also nice was how the conference organizers catered to a technical audience. I laughed when I saw they were showing The Matrix as the opening film that night. Sure, I would suspect everyone at the conference had already seen it, but it was fun anyway. And the door prizes that they gave away were fantastic - they had iPods and other tech geek prizes like certificates to Best Buy, some DVDs, etc. For best of track presentations, they gave away red Swingline staplers! Talk about getting in touch with the geek in all of us. And the best of conference presentation - a 60GB black video iPod. How cool is that?!
Well I presented at the conference on Lenya and how Hiram College is using it now. It was a two-hour presentation: one of only 3 others. The presentation went off without any hitches. It filled the time wonderfully, people were frequently asking questions, and great ones at that. People were genuinely getting excited about Lenya - so much so that I had a couple of people tell me they installed it on their laptops and started playing around with it that evening. Most people couldn't believe they never heard of Lenya, and many people told me they couldn't believe how easy it was to use!
So it so happens that my presentation won best of track (the Technical: Propeller Hats Required track) and also best of conference! Now that's truly humbling, and to anyone that watched the initial presentation and rated me as such, thank you very much. I so appreciated the time I got to spend at the conference speaking about my past experiences.
It was also fun to finally get to meet several people that I had conversed with through email. Hello to Rob and Rose at Penn State, Tim and Michelle at Queens U. in Canada, and to Justin at Michigan State! I hope I can continue to keep in touch with everyone.
It's been a while since anything's happened on this blog, but hopefully in the coming weeks you'll start to see why that's the case. :)
Rob - Nov 20, 11:34am
It was a great conference. I would encourage anyone involved with the web and higher education to attend in the future.
Your presentation was excellent. You took a highly technical subject and made it seem quite easy, to your credit. I think everyone in attendence would agree.
Hope to see you at future conferences.