Eeek! We caught a Geek!!

Rose Grzdanic and myself were lucky enough to have our very own geek in residence on Saturday night. Craig Bottomley (Botts!) was in Sydney from WA as part of a geek-fest up in Lithgow on the weekend.

I shouldnt be so disrespectful, because the geekfest was in aid of reviewing and consulting on some new tools being developed by Peter Shanks (Shaggy!) creator of the enchanting and hours of fun Flickr CC and the VTE trainers friend Training Packages Unwrapped.
Botts is right up there in my opinion as a human being and geek mentor extaordinaire. He won my heart years ago by demonstrating and sharing the plan for young people to achieve IT units of competence by setting up and participating in LAN parties!

So Rose and I had a geek to ourselves and we were very demanding to see, know and hear everything that Botts could tell us. Botts talked about how one resource - say a video - may need to be adapted into a few different file formats and presentations to make it available in the best way for learners, rather than just to suit whatever technology we (the teacher, the Institution) want to use.

I got a lot of value out of Botts and Rose, we covered a lot of mlearning territory -developing educational games for mobile devices and educational and commercial applications for premium SMS and MMS aggregators.

Rose and Botts also fleshed out and described the future with a merged google earth and second life environment where your real life location and environment is reflected in secondlife and your avatar friends can join you in a virtual geographical location of where ever you actually are!! Good one guys!

In a funny twist we ended up conversing with Alex Hayes on Skype who is over in the desert in Parngurr Western Australia connecting communities, minds and hearts - it almost seems like Alex crossed to the other side of the country when he heard Botts was coming.