Waiheke Island, Auckland - Sept 24

We had a nice last day with Stanley and colleagues yesterday. We spent the morning talking about Northtec's Certificate in eLearning Design and Development. I hope the Northtec team didn't feel assaulted by our comments, we had very little time to get an in depth insight into the course set up, but enough to make some pretty challenging comments about the use of Moodle and the like, but more important I think was the beginning of a debate about the use and appropriateness of open online spaces, as opposed to closed or private online spaces... since then, we have all had very passionate debates about this issue, and hopefully we will be able to represent the issue in the emergent issue wiki page and book.

After breakfast we jumped on a jet boat out to Poor Knights Islands. It was a spectacular trip.

Stanley and Mandi drove us all to Auckland that afternoon to meet John Eyles for the ferry across to Waiheke Island. We arrived on the Island at about 8pm and checked into Hekerua Lodge.

We had trouble settling into the lodge, needing more space and a better Internet connection so checked out the next morning with the intention to stay in Auckland tonight.

Currently we are at John's house where we have spent the day riding his wireless, catching up on uploading media and preparing content for the book of this journey. John has invited colleagues around and we have had rich discussions once again, joining in pre arranged web conferences relating to John's projects.

It has been a wonderful day, and a relief to catch up on a few things.

Teemu leaves tomorrow, so hopefully we can make a good start on the book before he is gone and tied up back into the day to day life in Helsinki.