Yesterday I wrote about my Panda-Drone hat (Hats are Good), and one of the useful things about the hat was that it allowed people to recognize me who had not met me in person before... which is pretty much everybody I met at InstructureCon, aside from the people I had met at Project Khaki. And that brings me to the topic of today's post: ALL THE FEELS. I really do not have words to describe what it was like to meet people I've known for years and years but whom I had never met in person. It was... wonderful......!
The very first person I met up with was on Tuesday morning: 700958421. Just by coincidence, he happened to be in the registering at the same time as I was! We then had a long conversation (I'll save that for tomorrow's blog post: I learned about TPACK for the first time!)... and here's a picture where Mathieu connected up that evening with me and also with Phil Hill and Michael Feldstein, all of us long-time acquaintances : yay!!!
And the next day I finally connected with @mpb , after playing telephone-tag and text-tag and tweeting each other; she figured out that a good place to rendezvous would be the big C·a·n·v·a·s letters just outside the conference center. That worked! Here's a picture:
Getting to meet up with old friends like this was an incredible privilege; there's nothing like a real hug!
At the same time, I have to add that the way we all got to know each other was by connecting : through blogs, Google+, Twitter, etc. When I met new people at InstructureCon, I was really happy when I found out that they are active at Twitter or in the Canvas Community, because that gives us a way for us to keep on connecting and learning from each other in the days and years to come.
There were also people I wanted to see at InstructureCon but whom I did not manage to run into. It was so chaotic, and there were so many people there: nothing had prepared me for the COLOSSAL scale of the event itself. But of course we can always just keep on connecting ... asynchronous meetings are easier to arrange, that's for sure, even if hugs are more fun.
Did anybody else have that thrill of meeting up with long-time virtual friends in actual reality...? For me, that was THE BEST THING of all... in the midst of so many other good things too. More about those other things to come. 🙂
