SITE Conference – March 26th 2007

After a long four hours flight from New Jesrsey, I landed in San Antonio in the evening. From the airport, I took a shuttle-bus to to the Crown Plaza hotel in San Antonio. The ride to the hotel (about 10 km) was quite bumpy, due to the poor condition of the roads. Reminded me oif the drive from Delhi airport in India. The sceneryy on route to the hotel looked very much like that in Malaysia, especially the trees and buildings.

On reaching the hotel, I checked in and had a quick shower and went down to the restaurant to grab a quick dinner. I was surprised that the first person I spoke to at the restaurant was actually a Filipino lady from Sydney. She was a lecturer at the Woolangong University and had come here with her daughter to attend the conference. What a small world! The next day I met a few others from Australia (one of whom is actually the president of SITE, the conference organisers). I also met an Indian guy, a lecturer at Penang University, Penang, Malaysia. I also met another Indian professor from Hydrebad, India who had come with seven of his PhD. students.

It was raining the whole morning. At noon, I decided to make a quick visit to the Riverwalk, the main attraction in San Antonio. I manged to walk up to where the Riverwalk started but then decided to get back to the hotel as the weather did not look very good and I had to attend a workshop at 1.30 pm.

At 1.30 pm, I attended the ‘Powerful Blending: Using Web 2.0 to Interact, Create, and Assess’ workshop, which was conducted by Wesley Fryer, Texas Tech University, USA. Those involved with educational blogging would know him as the owner of the blog ‘Moving at the Speed of Creativity’. He has actually blogged on some of the activities taking place at this conference.

Wesley’s workshop, which was three and half hours long, was both entertaining and informative. He covered on the many aspects of Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis and RSS feeds. He encouraged the use of Google reader and Firefox as feed readers, in preference to Bloglines and Internet Explorer, giving his reasons.

After diiner at the restaurant at the ground floor, I went back to my room. As I was still, quite tired, I retired early to bed. I had to get up early next morning as the first item for the day starts at 8.00 am.