After nearly 20 hours in the air and stops at four air­ports, I’ve made it to Mum­bai, India with col­leagues Scott McLeod and Jamie Fath for ASB Unplugged.  Today (Wednes­day) was the pre­con­fer­ence ses­sion with speaker Bruce Dixon from Any­where Any­time Learn­ing Foun­da­tion (AALF).

One of the great parts of the day was lis­ten­ing to and par­tic­i­pat­ing in con­ver­sa­tions with edu­ca­tors from around the world.  I was for­tu­nate to sit next to Dr. Bruce Kelsh who is a prin­ci­pal at an inter­na­tional school in Hong Kong that is mak­ing the move to one to one next year.  At lunch I also had a con­ver­sa­tion with Shabbi Luthra who is the direc­tor of tech­nol­ogy at ASB. Many of the chal­lenges of these edu­ca­tors are sim­i­lar to those things fac­ing edu­ca­tors in the United States.  Those chal­lenges include pro­vid­ing teacher sup­port and get­ting every­one on board with one to one.  With years of expe­ri­ence in a one to one school, Shabbi had some very inter­est­ing per­spec­tives on both issues.  Hope­fully after vis­it­ing ASB tomor­row, I will be able to get some addi­tional insight into these issues from an expe­ri­enced one to one school.

The pre­sen­ta­tion itself cov­ered lots of mate­ri­als.  Bruce warned us that he had enough mate­ri­als for four days, and he did have lots of infor­ma­tion.  Take a look at my notes from the day, but please note that I have a cou­ple of disclaimers.…

1. I don’t claim that my notes are com­plete.  Feel free to con­tact me if you were at the con­fer­ence and you would like to add to the notes or share your notes also! (njsauers@iastate.edu)
2. Many things I have writ­ten down are sim­ply ques­tions or con­ver­sa­tion starters.

You may also want to take a look at Wes Fryer’s notes  or a Pow­er­Point from one of Bruce’s pre­vi­ous pre­sen­ta­tions.  The con­ver­sa­tion from ASB Unplugged can also be fol­lowed on Twit­ter with the hash-tag ASBUP2010.

Nick Sauers