Do you have 20 minutes between this and that? We thought so. Make sure to stop by the MACUL Zone in the vendor hall to take a load off your feet, charge your device and listen to some awesome short presentations. Here’s the schedule for Tursday and Friday:
What would a technology conference be without the Internet? It wouldn’t – that’s what. One of things most participants don’t get to see is the initial setup of infrastructure at MACUL. Our wonderful MACUL Technology and A/V committee has worked very hard with several vendors to get you online.
Thanks to AT&T, Merit, eGearUSA, Maximize Technologies and Ruckus Wireless – and even bigger thanks to Tim Kamps (@tkamps) for acting as the project manager and cat herder to get things up and running.
Hopefully you get something like this when you are here… but realistically, when you have 4,000 people using the pipe, you may get a bit less.
Many of us use Twitter as our window to the world for personal and professional development. This week you can see exactly how powerful Twitter can be as you connect with other educators, follow their thoughts, sites and resources from sessions that you can’t be in (unless you have figured out a way to clone yourself – if so, see me).
Unfortunately, once MACUL 13 gets going, the Twitter SPAMbot’s will also start to notice the #MACUL13 hashtag. They will start to tweet all kinds of non-conference related detritus once they see that the hashtag starts trending upward.
What can you do? Twitter does have a mechanism for reporting SPAM as posted on their help documentation. We would love to have you play the Twitter SPAM Whack-a-mole game while at MACUL or playing along at home. When you see something that looks like it’s not even remotely related to the conference, please use the Report as Spam link. Thanks for your help this week!
I just turned on the iPad after a week or so of being stuffed in a backpack and discovered a plethora of updates waiting. I assume, as with all of these updates, that the total file size is in the gigabytes.
While you are packing and getting ready for the best conference in the universe, make sure to get all of your IOS, Mac OS and Windows updates going while you are home on a fast connection. As you have certainly experienced – your hotel Internet connection might not be what you have at home or school, and when 4,000+ people arrive at CoBo all trying to use the Internet at the same time, things may be interesting.
Speaking of available bandwidth, please make note of our MACUL Good Network Neighbor request. In short, if you don’t need the WiFi connection, please disable or turn it off. As Robert Fulghum said in All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten – “Share everything.” and ““And good neighbors make a huge difference in the quality of life.”
See you in the “D”! 
