Sept 21 - Northland starts

So here we are at NorthTec. We had an exciting flight (though rushed) connecting Auckland to Whangarei, but Stanley's warm greetings awaited us and we were bused off to a lovely hotel and Marina dinner.

Now we are at the Northtec. We had a Maori welcome given to us by Taipari Munroe - Maori adviser to the Northtec.

We then had a round of introductions, starting with the guests, then going through local participants. To conclude the introductions we heard a Waiata (song) called Ko Te Taitokerau. It was about the importance of supporting and encouraging learners and to take on board learning tools and to persevere.

Now we are all meeting and discussing the intros and emergent themes.

I have grabbed Konrad's laptop to make this post, and create a new wiki page to capture the emergent themes from the introductions. Steven Parker is setting up to capture video of people speaking to those emergent themes and will add the videos into the wiki. Konrad is scripting up a senario with a couple of people and Teemu Leinonen and I will start creating video scenarios based on the scripts.

Sean has already demonstrated moblogging (see photo above). And others are talking and updating content online... I hear talk of copyright, intellectual property, privacy and online identity...

The plan this arvo is to bring everyone back from there initial discussions and demonstrate or describe projects already happening (such as the emergent themes videos, this blog entry, moblogging and others I'm not yet aware of...)

Significant to note the network set up Northtec had going. Here's Stanley on video telling us how it was set up:

Leigh managed to grab a few moments with AStanley Frielick to get the details on how Northtec has successfully implemented a wireless network.