9th November 2006

Aloha from Hawa’ii

posted in edtech, history, travel |

Well, yesterday was a bit of an adventure, but I ended up successfully flying standby from Oklahoma to Honolulu (after missing my initial flight) for the 2006 Hawaii Library Association’s conference. I got to the hotel in Honolulu last night at 2 am US Central time, so it was quite a long travel day, but I have most of the day today to get acclimated to the new time zone and put everything together for my four presentations on Friday and Saturday. Getting online this morning, I was amazed at the number of wireless options that are available from my hotel room:

Lots of Wireless Options

In addition to getting my presentations finalized today, I plan to do some video podcasting. I’ll elaborate more in the video podcast, but it is absolutely incredible that it is possible to leave my home state of Oklahoma and about 16 hours later, be 3,700 miles away on the far western edge of the United States in the Hawaiian Islands. Looking over the Sierra mountains yesterday as we flew into California, my thoughts turned to Lewis and Clark and the amazing odyssey they embarked upon just over two hundred years ago to reach the Pacific Ocean from the midwest of North America by boat and on foot. Would they ever have dreamed that an era of transportation and communication such as that in which we now live would ever dawn? I think the very idea was likely too far outside their own experiences and imaginations to have even been possible.

Here is an image I snapped with my cell phone this morning, looking out from my balcony toward the Pacific Ocean to the south:

Waikiki Beach

It is also amazing that my attendance at and participation in this conference is directly related to my blogging and podcasting activities over the past couple of years. Without my blog, I don’t think I would have made any connections with the HLA 2006 conference organizers and be here at all to listen, learn, share and experience. The F2F world has direct ties to the virtual world, and this conference experience is exciting proof.

Aloha from Hawa’ii!

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