Turning the Supertanker

Our hotel is a short 400m walk from the University and over breakfast it was obvious, because of the conversations we heard, that many of the guests would turn out to be our fellow delegates.  After a short walk on cobbled streets, past one onion domed church in blistering heat at 8:00 am, we arrived at the university. The university is celebrating its 660th birthday, but the faculty of education is only 70 years old and this particular faculty building’s architecture proudly flaunted its stolid early C20th architectural style.  Registration was a quick affair and all at once we were in the lecture theatre armed with the usual booty of conference registrations!

A quick scan down the list of presenters revealed that I was the only representative from New Zealand and to my increasing alarm that Helen and I were the only practicing teachers.  All the others who were to speak are all University lecturers with PhD’s.  As the day wore on it became abundantly clear that the vast majority of the papers being discussed had already been published and peer reviewed in academic journals.  Helen and I started to feel like minnows swimming in a tank of sharks!   However as the day wore on this welling sense of dread was abated somewhat when the organising president of the World Computer Congress 2009 specifically mentioned our presentation stating that he was particularly looking forward to hearing how we had built and sustained our ‘vibrant online learning community.’  After that we started to begin to feel a little better, even privilleged to be the only representatives of the real world reality of classroom teaching that our fellow delegates theorise about at this conference.

There is no doubt that we are presenting at an important organisation.  IFIP is an organisation that was set up by UNESCO and has 14 organising committees.  The age of the committe is denoted by the number and the education one, at which we are speaking is 3, which indicates that it was set up at the start of the organisation.  The AGM is tomorrow.  By the way, the organising president of WCC2009 asked me in one of he breaks whether i would be presenting at WCC2009.  I knew about the conference from earlier net searches, it is in Brasil…. I wonder if I could get funding?

So as I write this we are due to do our presentation in just a few hours.  Last night, we wandered around the old part of the city to clear our heads.  Prague is truly wonderful, well the old bits that we have seen are.  We had dinner in a fantastic restaurant and then got back to the hotel to work on our presentation for the final time.  Today’s the day.

The journey to Prague has been an interesting one.  I will refrain from commenting on Easy Jet until I get back from Athens at the end of next week, but suffice it to say that we were delayed.  Indeed, delayed, inconvenienced and downright petrified would be good words to describe Sunday.

Apart from the fun of seeing my brother in law, there was a logic to staying in Luton, where he lives.  Over the duration of my stay I will be flying into and out of three of London’s airports, Heathrow, Gatwick and Luton.  Luton is ideally placed as a place to stay for this kind of trip. However I use the words Luton, ideal and stay advisedly in one sentence.  If the architectural historian who critiques northern architecture, Grundy’s Wonders could be enticed to venture south, he would have a lot to say about Luton and not a lot of it would be good…

However the train route that Luton is on links directly with Brighton on the south coast and one of the stations along the way is Gatwick airport, this is what makes makes Luton an ideal location, it is an easy drive from Heathrow, has its own airport and is on the direct train link to Gatwick.  However this weekend, right after I had been charged 22 pounds, I learnt that I was not able to go right through London, but had to get off at St Pancras due to essential engineering works at Blackfriars.  I therefore had to get accross town, suitcase and all using the tube, what an exercise in madness that is, how anyone with a wheelchair negotiates the London Underground with its myriad of levels, stairs and inter connecting bridges is a wonder.  Anyway the 50 minute trip from Luton to Gatwick took just over two hours.  So hot and sweaty I was late to meet Helen.

After the initial hellos we quickly settled to working on our presentation for the first time in person amidst the throngs of the great British public making their annual pilgrimage to the Costas for too much sun, too much of everything…

We were delayed by Easy Jet and had to hang around for ages to check in, the cute dogs of Auckland Airport were not nearly as cute at Gatwick. This was in part due to their breed but principally they were being handled by Police, armed to the teeth with machine guns and they were not checking to see if you had a banana in your bag, they were looking for something all together more sinister.  After the scrum of check in and the dogs and guns, we had to run the gauntlet of UK security.  They make you take everything off, shoes, belts, watches etc (interestingly the metal in my arm, does not set off the alarms).  With everything being scanned it is and was hard to keep track of what you had upon you before the deconstruction of your being to be scanned, prodded and x-rayed.  I temporarily mislaid my passport in the melee.  Helen however did not fair as well as me, she had already been through the same security process earlier in the day as part of her flight up to London from Plymouth, however on this second scan they found her utility knife in her handbag (see above) it was all very funny, but it was not happening to me…

90 minutes after we should have left we departed Gatwick on an Airbus bound for Prague.  We were further delayed by the luggage handlers in Prague, so it was well after 11:00 when we staggered out of the terminal to be picked up by the hotel transfer driver, who spoke two words of English, yes and no and used them in a random staccato fashion that made no sense, by the time we had left the airport perimeter we had all fallen into a weary silence, partly brought on by his driving skill.  He was a man on a mission, traffic lights and general road craft were an optional extra as was the brake pedal, my right leg had practically cramped through phantom breaking by the time we arrived at the hotel.  It has to be said that traveling at speed on a motorway is one thing, however doing that same speed on the cobbled streets of a medieval city is quite another.  At one point after we had crossed the river into the old city, we were doing 110km…  Sleep was not an easy state to acquire that night as images of the city, replayed at great speed, flashed disconcertingly across my sub conscious state…  What a way to prepare for a presentation.

Image from: http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200710/r194207_736065.jpg

My bags are packed, tickets double checked. (Not that they issue tickets these days! I have a print out from my computer and have already reserved my seats there and back!) All cables and electronic peripherals that seem to be the indispensable ephemera of modern existence are all charged. International adapters packed and presentation printed off, saved in three places and even posted to a wiki (just in case!). Camera with plenty of CF cards packed and lenses polished. I am good to go.

The next couple of weeks will be daunting, fun an adventure all mixed into one. Tomorrow night (Thursday) I depart Auckland for Singapore, I hope to blog along the way if I can tap into some wifi hotspots. Not long to wait in Singapore, before getting on the London flight. I arrive in London Friday afternoon, local time. 2:15 AM Saturday morning for my body clock! I sat down and worked it out, this will be the 23rd time I have done this trip (Auckland to London or London to Auckland), I am currently working on a carbon footprint post…. As Steve Kosovich said to me recently, I will have to cycle to work for several eternities to work off that personal carbon debt!

I fly to Prague on Sunday and stay until Thursday. On the Friday I will ‘drop’ in on my old school in St Albans in Hertfordshire and surprise them, mind you if they read this, it will not be a surprise! I will be catching up with friends along the way too. On the Sunday I take a train to Plymouth, spend the remainder of Sunday on the trail of all things Brunel, especially the Royal Albert Bridge. Then on the Monday I will spend the day with Helen’s class and after school give a presentation at their staff meeting about how ICT is happening here on the Supertanker.

That evening it is back to London, then on the Tuesday I fly to Athens to meet my daughter who will have just flown in from Auckland, ensure that she makes her connecting flight to the island where her grandparents live for half of the year. Wednesday it is back to London and on the Friday I fly out of Heathrow on one of those shiny new A380 double deck super Jumbos that Singapore Airlines have just purchased.

Sometime on that Saturday evening I arrive back in Auckland.

As I have said, I intend to blog along the way, post a few images of my travels and generally divert from the educational norm of this post for some gratuitous tourist snaps! I will also be feeding back from the conference too.

For the next two weeks I think that, excess coffee, spirulina and the mantra that sleep is over rated will be the norm if I am to achieve what I have planned on my overly full itinerary. If there is a fuel embargo, French Air Traffic controllers strike or some such fact of European life, I am going to be in a bit of a bind as there is no room for error!

C’est la vie!

…you wait and two come at once!

I have had two fantastic events happen this week. The programme for Prague has been released, I now know when and on what day I am presenting with Helen. It is all coming together and almost daily Helen and I are working on our presentation. When we finally meet at Gatwick airport in June we will then have the opportunity to polish the presentation further.

Going back to Gatwick for the first time in many years will be rather nostalgic as I used to pass through Gatwick airport every day on my commute to work. I used to live in north London and commute to Gatwick, to where our large photographic studio was in one of the warehouses at the edge of the runway. We were right next door to the Virgin Airlines training facility, complete with a mock up of a 747 cabin for passenger refreshment delivery training…

It has been an interesting exercise in professional collaboration with Helen not only to get the entire tohatoha project off the ground, but putting this paper and presentation together. It has taken a lot of effort on beahalf of both of us, but the results have been more than worth it. There has been a spin off, I will be visiting Helen’s class on 30 June and the school has asked me to make a presentation to them at a staff meeting that day, before I get the train back to London and my flight to Athens (long story). Now I am working on that presentation too.

The second bus of the metaphor is that I have been approached in the last week by ICT learning in Kuala Lumpur to run some workshops and speak at one of their conferences in August. This connection was made through Greg Adams at Interface magazine, thanks Greg. This is exactly the kind of thing that I want to do, reach out and share to the greater teaching world, the potential of ICT and especially the raft of online web2.0 tools to enhance the conditions of learning for our students.

Of course I said yes, now I have another set of presentations and workshops to prepare. How good is that?!