The Start of Digital Now Day 2...

Morning... I woke this morning to look out of my balcony to see a fantastic red sky reaching across the harbor in front of me. Although beautiful, red skies in the morning make me nervious. I didn't think we were supposed to have bad weather this weekend, but I guess I really shouldn't care. The only time I made it outside yesterday is when we all went down to the pool before dinner. It was pretty neat, they were playing "Meet the Robinson's" on a projector near the pool. We hung out at first just in the hot tub, for we'd heard someone had just finished throwing up in the main pool.
We got hot pretty quickly and went to this other pool that was near by, it was in this large target shape and for some reason had attracted some ducks. Ann thought they were pretty cool and tried her best to catch one... she was unsuccessful.

Later that evening we had a nice dinner at this Steakhouse in the convention center. We ate with Jim Bower (Ph. D, Founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Whyville) a pretty interesting fellow to say the least, Tamara Adlin (Principal, Adin Inc. and former Senior Customer Experience Specialist with Amazon.com), Peter Censky (Executive Director of the Water Quality Association), and a friend of Tamara who's name I seem to have forgotten. Even though we were at a steakhouse I ended up only having french onion soup as it was already 10 pm. We had some great discussions about some interesting cultural aspects, and some very interesting conversations about topics I don't think I wish to share... It got to a point where the table became too adult for me and I had become tired, so I retired early to my lonely abode.

Lauren and I though have made some great leaps thus far though in concepts for our Senior Production class... While not revealing too much, we've been developing a concept based around a civilization we are conceptualizing... So far it's pretty neat, we'll see how much more we can conceptualize throughout today and in between sessions.

Alright, I'm going to get some breakfast... Let's see what today has in store for me.

OH! One last thought http://www.champlain.edu/centers/emc/projects/index.php Check it out... it's funny how much has gone on that I've forgotten about too haha including the super holiday card Vanessa, Mike, and I made.

Digital Now 2008... Day 1

My experience here started off to an interesting start last night. In a search for food our team, Sarah, Lauren, Ann, and I, were forced to eat at this appetiser bar place at the Disney Contemporary resort. While scarfing down as much food as we could, Andrew Hinton (Chief Information Architect of Vanguard) noticed we were holding our Digital Now fliers and decided to come over and chat with us. This spurred a great conversation about games and many of the concepts Lauren, Ann, and I have been preaching all year long. This was a great talk, for me at least because I think it really helped me get my mind back to the subject matter and ready for the following day. I retired to my suite on the fifth floor, while the girls left me to theirs on the eleventh. I felt lonely at first and then was soon comforted by my awesome suite, with complimentary computer with Internet access and balcony. =)

We all woke up early today to be here at 7 AM for breakfast. Afterwards we heard from a general sessions from Hugh Lee (who we met at MPI) and Don Dea, the President and Co-founder of Fusion Productions. Then Chris Anderson, Editor-in-chief of Wired, gave a great key note about the power of Niches... still trying to wrap my head around it.

Afterward I attended a really great session called "The three Cs of Value: Content, Context, and Connections," by Ellen Wagner (Senior Director of Worldwide eLearning Solutions with Adobe Systems. She was fantastic! She illustrated some of the points we've been speaking out about for years. She discussed how powerpoint was no longer acceptable and that these new learning technologies really were changing everyone's expectations. She even gave a brief talk about serious games and how fundamental they are. Needless to say Lauren and I were pretty excited. We then heard from discussion of panelists, who all supposedly were integrating eLearning solutions in their own businesses. Gah! That was frustrating unfortunately... It seems as though many business leaders are getting extremely close to grasping the concept but aren't quite there. They seem to recognize that the next generation of workers just flat out learn differently, but I don't think they've found out how to respond to that. From the sounds, they are attempting to reach out, by putting their teaching basis on the web but that just isn't enough.... You aren't reaching out to us just by putting information on the computer.... You aren't engaging us and therefor we aren't personalizing the information and not just not learning! Well that's my rant...

Another thought that I found was pretty funny was that there are so many people here that are completely amazed by facebook, myspace, and other social networking tools that most people my age take for granted. I attended another session entitled "Social Networking," and apparently business professionals really want a social networking tool for their organizations as a networking tool. There's a big talk about how if companies should work with facebook and other pre-made tools or develop their own...


We also had a great talk about the Semantic Web and Twine (look it up online). This is a new form of web browsing for Web 3.0. He talked about how at first we tagged websites with keywords(yahoo), then we developed algorithms biased on the links on the website search engines found(google), and now they are developing the next development in search engines the semantic web. The next step after this people are saying is that Web 4.0 will actually have an AI and be intelligent... weird I know...

I just finished my last keynote for the day... I believe... On Whyville, an extremely interesting concept! Yet a somewhat annoying presenter though... I believe all we have left of today is more meet and greet stuff... but I really need to go for now because Ann just told us something extremely exciting but also something I can't share here =)

Will post when I can...