Made it to Atlanta

I made it to Atlanta, or Hotlanta as it were. I think it was 90 degrees today and humid. The plane ride was mostly uneventful though it took an hour to get the baggage claim. The plane had to be towed to the terminal for some reason so we sat on the tarmac for a while. I made it with barely 30 minutes before the opening session.

I’m encouraged by their focus on reflection. Each day will end with some reflection time. They even provided a little notebook meant to be a journal. Diana Oblinger, yes the Educause president, lead the opening session. She mentioned 4 key ideas to help us frame our time here:

1. lifelong learning — we will always need to be learning, we can’t know everything
2. how to think about things — leaders need to know how to frame (or re-frame) issues, build judgement skills, know what you believe in. We need to make time to think about things as opposed to doing things.
3. interact — with each other and the speakers.
4. reflect — spend time processing and reflecting

We paired off and interviewed someone else and introduced them. Always a good exercise. There are a lot of library folks and some people from far-off places like Australia or Manchester (yay!).

Visited with a nice group at dinner — learned about how different libraries are at big universities — digitization huge. Also got a good tip on reading the Register for a UK perspective on IT (more weary of google). I’ll put it in my Netvibes feed and see how I like it. I recently added the Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog and am enjoying that.