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The Big New Zealand Finale: "Rip. Mix. Learn."

Today is my last day in a little slice of green heaven known as New Zealand where I have been visiting and giving workshops at several institutions in the Auckland area (see the CogDog's upside down inverted cousin, the CogDog(kiwi)Blog).

Among other bits, I've been stirring up the interest in wikis here-- and like my standard fashion, I go about getting folks excited about technology and then I leave ;-) All of my workshops and presentations have been provided in 100% wiki format, and you can find a mirror of this content at:

http://realgar.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/wiki

where you may notice that this wiki is completely read-only, a steel walled, secret service escorted, roach proof one way wiki (to keep the traffic down on their server here, be nice!!).

There is a new collection I quickly assembled for my last demo today "Riding the Wiki School Bus: How Educators are Getting on Board" a shopping list of where educators are on the wiki wiki bus.

Anyhow, yesterday was my over ambitious attempt to hit an audience with a fire house of technology, what I titled "Rip.Mix.Learn.":

http://realgar.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/wiki?RipMixLearn

This was for a group of mostly faculty gathered two days for a "Symposium" on "Conversations On Teaching and Learning"- and the graciously tried to keep attention to me throwing about 20 technology ideas at them in 45 minutes. I did ask at the end for some hand raises to my question, "Was this too much technology?" and most were up. That's okay- my whole purpose was to ask them to be aware the things are happening out there at a crazy pace, and to keep that in mind while getting hunkered down in local issues and grappling with Blackboard.

They did get a chuckle on my disclaimer about predicting the future.

Again the "gap" between today's teachers and students is grand, and may even being growing wider. I attempted to demonstrate this between a musical metaphor of comparing teaching as an orchestra conductor to how today's students access music of choice from the Apple iMac ad "The Concert".

As predicted at the end they all gave polite applause... and gave me a bottle of wine. Not bad, eh?

Anyhow, it has been a most fantastic time here. New Zealand is just an amazing place to just see (see my flickr photos) and the people are outstanding, outgoing, and wonderful even if they do not understand how my country operates (I could not add any clarity there).