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I am now in few minutes starting my presentation in a virtual conference held by <a href="http://nordflex.net/">nordflex.net everyday 24 - 30 October 2006. The topic of the conference is this: Learning objects are everywhere - How do we catch them? LO using the newest technologies, podcat, blogg, wiki, mindmapping, games etc.

Here are my slides:

Anything that can go wrong, will

Just my luck or Murphys law right now a group of workers started heavy road work just outside my window with lots of noice. I went out just  to ask them to be quit just while I was giving my presentation but none of the workers were Icelandic and they did not seem to understand English. Then their boss came, he is Icelandic and was very angry and started to argue with me, started our conversation: "You have no right to stop our work... you hear not inside your room any noise". First I was only asking them politely to do some other work for one hour and then the noise was so high that I did not hear anything inside my room. That is just the situation I need before the presentation.  This is very funny.

But for my ed tech history here is how this presentation went and how I prepared for the virtual environment:

• I downloaded the Marratech client in my work computer.
• I found out I was not able to use Marratech in my office because of firewall blocking
• I went home and downloaded Marratech client on my laptop at home
• I tried the featured on Marratech and read about the system.
• I attended a special trying out session and found I could see and hear other participants and see the slides. I tested my sound and they were able to hear me.
• I attended to the morning section of the virtual conference on October 24th and all was fine. After the session I practiced uploading slides and it went fine.
• Sigrun lend me Logitech webcam in order for me to also have video. I tried to connect it (via USB) to my computer and the computer did not recognise the camera and did not find any driver for it. There were no marks on the camera telling me what model it was, I only knew it was Logitech so I search the Internet for drivers, first by searching for pictures of "Logitech webcam" and then by downloading the newest drivers for Logitech Quickcam, 70 mb and testing and still no video connection.  I decided not to use video.
• I logged in to the virtual conference room one hour before the session. Uploaded the slides and tested the audio.Everything worked fine.
• Group of workers started heavy road work outside my window with unbearable noice.
• When I started my presentation everything was ok. There were around twenty people in the room. But after the first few slides I had this uncunny feeling that I was alone in the world and just speaking to myself.
• I was right. I had lost the connection. I had internet but was not able to reconnect to the conference room.
• I reset all that I could reset in my environment and was finally able to reenter the room - only to loose the connection few minutes later.
• I reconnected again two or three times more but my connection to the virtual conference room was very unstable.
• The lesson to be learned from this besides the old truth Anything that can go wrong, will is that the more things that can go wrong the more things will go wrong and this kind of learning environment is very unstable right now and very frustating. But eventually it will be better and some of the bottlenecks will go away. I suspect my loosing of Internet connection might be a bandwidth problem. But right now I feel quit frustrated, I feel that I did everything I could to prepare for the session and here I have only mentioned the technical side of it but I was not able to get my message through because of technical blockers.
• But words of wisdom is that you should try to change your failures into success.. or at least see what you can gain ...be it experience, be it knowledge or be it skills to avoid pitfalls in the future. Since this was a session about blogging I am ending this by writing this blog - this journal entry reflecting on my learning experience in  an uncommon learning setting and perhaps I can link to this blog entry in the Moodle seesion which is also part of the virtual conference and thus demonstrate how blog can be used in frustrating learning environment.
• Came to think of it, perhaps most people have to  learn and relearn something right now in an environment which  is frustrating and unpredictible..  traditional school setting is exactly opposite... calm and cosy and locked environments with shortcuts  and predifined paths and  right/wrong answers.

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