Distance Learning Alliance Conference — Asheville

I believe that I am going to enjoy a unique experience today. I’m speaking at the North Carolina Distance Learning Alliance conference in magnificent Asheville, North Carolina. I know a number of educators who will be hear, teachers and administrators who have dedicated a great deal of their time and formidable creativity to distance learning. It’s a topic that I have not focused very much attention to. We choose what we want to concentrate on, and the technology and technique of DL has not been one of my choices. Yet, I’m intrigued by what has been accomplished, and have even found that teaching from a distance has some interesting appeal to it.

Today, I’ll be doing my “Telling the New Story” presentation, and I confess that I’ve worried a bit about how much this presentation be of value to this audience. However, having just gone over the address, I’m pretty confidence that it speaks to their interests and mission. In fact, I’m even more intrigued by their experience, as online educators. I have often blogged about how, if we are truly going to integrate contemporary literacy into our classrooms, we need to simply throw out all of the paper and books, and transform our classrooms into exclusively digital environments, and then “teach”. Well these folks have already done, just that.

I’m looking forward to this two day conference and will likely be blogging the experience, taking pictures, and maybe even interviewing a few of the people I meet. I’ll be tagging my e-correspondes with “ncdla” for North Carolina Distance Learning Alliance.