So this year I attended InstructureCon solo. Not for one minute did I think I would be alone, but honestly I had no idea what to expect. And look what happened....
Over the course of the week I ran into all kinds of people.
During the Canvas Intelligence Exchange I was able to meet many new people. I had a really nice side conversation with @pchaney about Canvas Data, and got to meet the all famous @travis_cox After firing back and forth through the Community with dgrobani , we finally had a chance to meet in person and share ideas about what we've been working on, very cool. I have seen several posts in the Community from @peter3 and actually got to sit and talk to him at Hack Night, where we engaged in a conversation about XAPI and Caliper with a developer from Penn State and a member of Unicon which was a great intro for me into these tools. Did I mention I got to shake the hand of snufer?
Of course there were Canvas peeps all over the place, too many to name... Hillary Melander enlightened me on the Canvas Network and hooked me up with the guys at ShinDig for some great info related to a real time course collaboration project I have been working on. I got to catch up with our awesome CSM Deactivated user and had a really good sit down with Deactivated user and some friends about the API. Of course if you didn't run into @Renee_Carney or @scottdennis or stefaniesanders or @kmeeusen , you might have spent too much time looking at your phone while you moved around the conference. I would love to list ALL of the Canvas people that I met during the week.
The vendors were great too. @Kim_AspirEDU and @Chris_Munzo continue to do great things with Dropout Detective, and it was really nice to be able to catch up with them. Annie Chechitelli and the folks at AWS Education were able to answer some questions that have been on my mind and will help to start thinking about strategy. Mike Zackrison at CidiLabs enlightened me on their product to assist with instructional design, and I look forward to learning more. There were many vendor conversations and the time spent was valuable.
However, as much fun as it was running around solo, there were a few faces that I continued to run into over and over. Somehow this group came together at River Run for the last night, and we had a great time shutting down the village.
The picture above includes @kenneth_rogers , @kschneider25 , @rseilham , awilliams, @G_Petruzella and @erin_milne . These guys really made the week fun.
Attending the conference on my own absolutely lived up to expectations, honestly it was hard to find time to stop, breath and regroup. I hope everyone walked away with some good stories, new friends and new contacts to help make their Canvas experience the best that it can be.
#instcon> operation -instructurecon 0017 -mission accomplished
#instcon> successful
#instcon> _
.png "Chris_Munzo"){kind=avatar}
.png "rjacobson"){kind=avatar}
