Thursday is nearly Friday here and already Friday back home. I have to get up at oh-no-thirty to be at the conference center for the speaker’s breakfast so I can get materials and meet speakers for the session I’m convening. So this will have to be quick, with details to come.

What happened?
What didn’t?

I heard Marcus Buckingham (author of First, Break All The Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths) deliver a funny, touching, inspiring, and curiously charming hour-long talk at a plenary session. Afterwards, I was one of the fortunate ones who were in line early enough to get the latter book signed by Mr. Buckingham. Best of all, I got to shake his hand and thank him for changing my life for the better. There was a moment of connection and I’m satisfied he knows I’m grateful. I believe my gratitude matttered to us both for that moment.

Then some vendor strolls and the chance to touch base with the Camtasia TechSmith folks for whom our own Andy Rush is the poster child. Go Andy!

Then a freewheeling, intense, and thought-provoking lunch session on change management led by Dennis Trinkle of DePauw University. Dennis is an inspiration through and through. One of the great pleasures of my fledgling IT career has been to meet him, to learn from him, to use him as a sounding board, and to bring his expertise and vision into the work I’m attempting to do back home. After the session and to my very great delight, I got to spend nearly two hours in rich conversation with Dennis, catching up on his family, his work, him. I always feel steadier and more energized when I talk to Dennis. Neat trick. Wonder how he does it? And I got to thank him for turning me on to the Buckingham books, with all that’s meant for me over the last six months.

During that conversation, who happened by but Brian Lamb, fellow In-N-Out voyager, NLII friend, and yet another inspiration: the man who brought the wiki to Mary Washington. We’ve used his wikispace in DTLT for some time. Well, Brian knows Bryan Alexander (the virtual presence hovering through much of the conference’s conversations, though he wasn’t here), and Dennis knows Bryan, so now Brian knows Dennis, and another little circle meets. That itself would have been enough to savor for days, but Brian, like Dennis, is a walking university of thought, so after Dennis had to leave Brian and I sat and talked animatedly for another hour or so, during which time I learned about ten or fifty new cool things in contexts that made them almost instantly meaningful (Brian has a gift that way) and discovered, indeed was gobsmacked by, the fact that Brian was working on a set of wiki pages that would format and present the cyberealspace transcript that had emerged from the Horizons VCOP lunch the day before.

Deep breath. Okay. I certainly wasn’t expecting that contact, those connections, that shared bit of destination.

My brain was now tucked in for a four-course meal with dessert. How much more food for the mind could I ingest? Who knows? After all the excited conversation–go long, go deep–Brian and I walked over to the Vicki Suter session on the future of conferences now, which would feature Brian’s wiki of the melded transcripts of the cyberealspace interactions of the day before. There was a giant projected image of what had happened. Those of us who were there told stories of what had happened, or at least what we thought had happened. There was spirited agreement, disagreement, even spirited pausing for reflection. It was a great session that did what few sessions do: enabled focused yet spontaneous interaction that got very quickly both to pragmatic considerations and to intensively philosophical conceptualizing. I met some more fascinating people. There was a rich concern for language as well as an interesting and consistent elasticity of thought. Whatever miraculous thing began yesterday was continuing today and the reflection keeps building in my mind–and others’. I’ve got enough stuff to think through to last me many months, and I’ve had an experience that proves upon my pulses that there are extraordinary places we can get to in teaching and learning by using these tools effectively. I feel very deeply about these possibilities. I think I am beginning to understand how to articulate some of them, thanks to the tutelage of the folks I’ve met up with at this conference.

The day was not yet over. I met more of the DePauw crew and joined them for a drink after the rodeo. I can say no more at this point, but it was a jubilant and lovely coda to a day of constant, intense learning for me. Every contact had a richness that was both extended in time and, it seemed, immediately available, as if no time had intervened between one meeting and the next and as if we could proceed to the deep stuff as quickly or in as leisurely a manner as we wanted. It was, in short, real school. I now know more about how to take that real school back home in a cyberspace vanagon.

A happy day.

And so to bed.