Waking up in Monterey

It’s the day after — a long day of speaking at the WCON conference in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and then the remainder of the day flying west to San Jose, and a sometimes treacherous drive to Monterey. But it’s all worth it as the sun starts to rise, bouncing gorgeous yellow red off the clouds over the Pacific, and the sound of seals barking with the surf. I have a magnificently emerging view of the bay, as more light slides across the northern hemisphere.

OK, I have a good reason to be writing like this. I glanced at my clock a few hours ago to see that it was already 5:59. I jumped up, dashed over to my computer to learn that it was only 2:59, a fact confirmed by the apologetic front desk clerk, whom I called. Jumping up makes it pretty hard for me to get back to sleep. So I decided to work through my slides for today’s keynote, and now it’s already time to get ready to pack up and go to work. I’m going to be hurting later on today.

Today is the Monterey Tech 2006 conference, cooperatively sponsored by the California League of High Schools, League of Middle Schools, and the Computer Using Educators. The audience will probably be quite different from the highly tech-savvy educators I worked with yesterday in Wisconsin. They will likely be middle and high school teachers of all brands, and a few tech educators peppered in. The conference theme and tagline is Teaching the Millennial Generation and I will be talking about just that, the millennials with some discussion about the economic landscape, the landscape of their play and work, and the rapidly changing information landscape and what it means to teachers and classrooms.

Then I’ll deliver two breakout sessions on blogging and podcasting. Then it’s home for a full week. Glorious!