Every year, my office sponsors the Conference on Instructional Technologies, one of SUNY’s largest conferences. This year almost 600 of us met on the campus of SUNY Plattsburgh way up there on Lake Champlain near the Canadian border.
[And let me take this chance to thank the staff at Plattsburgh and President John Ettling for their wonderful hospitality and the FACT Council and Center for Professional Development who organized and supported the conference, especially Nancy Motondo and her team.]
Every year at the CIT, there’s one or two technologies that cause a buzz. This year it was Second Life and iTunesU. Beyond all the demos and excitement of how these environments can be used for learning, we may have had another SUNY first:our keynote speaker, Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium had his flight from Austin, TX cancelled. Instead of just talking the talk, he decided to walk the virtual walk. With the help of Craig Lending, Chair of FACT and the great media folks at Plattsburgh, we projected his presentation, including a PowerPoint show and live voice, from SecondLife. At the same time, there was an audience in the NMC learning space. Some were recruited beforehand, some were literally drop-ins (they flew down into their seats as you can do in Second Life). And – here might be the breakthrough – at least one clever person was in the auditorium at Plattsburgh and signed onto her SL account and teleported to watch the NMC show in virtual reality.
Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium ( in the distance, right) live” on Second Life to the CIT at SUNY Plattsburgh, May 30, 2007.
I need to interview her to find out what it was like to be in two places at once. Was it like being nowhere at all? How did she deal cognitively with the stereopticon performance? Did the time lag cause a little schizophrenia or cognitive dissonance? Which experience was more satisfying and why?
