ITEC was AWESOME!!!!

OK, you know that I spent Sunday through Tuesday in Des Moines at the state technology fair for the Iowa Technology and Education Connection organization. It was an opportunity for over 500 educators to compare notes and learn new things.

We, the Instructional Technology division in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Northern Iowa, tried something new this year. We had a booth where we promoted our Instructional Technology Masters Program. This is a 2-year distance education cohort that is delivered through the ICN (a state-owned video conferencing system.)

We handed out stickers (see above). Steve Wozniak (Apple Computer inventor) and David Pogue sported our stickers as you can see on the Rob Blog.
It was exciting to see scores of attendees wearing our stickers. This allowed us the opportunity to talk with lots of people hopefully they will join us in our program that begins in Summer 2008.

The greatest part was seeing all of our graduates who were running the conference and who had leadership technology roles in the state.

Steve Wozniak at ITEC

I have just listened to Steve Wozniak talk about his life of fiddling and creating with technology all of his life. It was really quite interesting to hear that he was a geek from an early age.

Someone just asked him for an outrageous dream. He responded that he would like to create a globe that would display Google Earth. We could just point to places that on the earth and then interact with it that way.

Another guy just asked how it felt to make such a huge difference in the world. I don't think that he really understood the point of the question because he just recounted the things that he did. Said that he invented a computer because he wanted to play games and do his HP work at home.

This is over and we need to get ready to present our panel discussion on Confronting the Challenges of Web 2.0. It will be in this room of 400 people. Wonder how many will show up.