Yesterday I had the pleasure of being involved in an event with the Naace*and MP Jim Knight, Minister of State for Schools and Learners. My role was to give, at distance, a tour of the IBM University Relations island to the audience at Torquay, with me based at Winchester, and Jim based in London! (if that makes sense). Whilst my portion of the event went quite smoothly I'm pleased to say, the event had its fair share of hiccups. Including, speakers not being present, people dialling in and out of the conference call mid speech (yes that's right, the audio was conference call while we were presenting in world!?) and some fairly run of the mill Second Life issues. On the whole, it felt perhaps like a bit of an opportunity missed and in my opinion, most of the problematic factors could have been solved by those leading the event logistics. However, it was a good opportunity to showcase what IBM is doing between industry and academia.
The main focus for me was to talk about IBM's event with Manchester University to talk about mainframe computing, which happened today. Whilst the attendance was not as good as hoped (I think we peaked at about 15 people), the level of interaction was excellent and in fact we over ran the talk by about 45 minutes answering questions. Give me 15 engaged people rather than 50 zombies any day! Some good questions about IBM careers afterwards too, almost certainly more of these events to follow. Also, many thanks to Chris Hodgins for hosting the talk today.* Note - You can now also see the writeup by Chris.. here
* Naace is the professional association for those concerned with advancing education through the appropriate use of information and communications technology (ICT). The Association was established in 1984 and has become the key influential professional association for those working in ICT in education.
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