I'm sitting at the 2008 Manitoba Edubloggercon being held at the Princess Street campus of Red River College in downtown Winnipeg.

Eight presentations later things have become a little more organic. People are asking questions and the chat room in Ustream is replying instantly with answers, links, information, and resources to share. John Evans has just invited people to come up to his laptop right now and he's setting them up with twitter accounts so they can start building their personal learning networks. Brian Crosby just skyped in to answer questions about students at risk. People are just starting to get a sense of what comes from sipping the electric kool-aid.

Andy McKiel is the brains and brawn behind all this. He arranged the venue, made sure there was food and drink, coordinated the schedules of eight crazy busy people from two Canadian provinces and Thailand (the airports there are still closed today, Jeff Utecht showed us the role twitter is playing in the capture of the airports). Andy is a class act in everything he does. More Manitoban teachers need to know how fortunate we all are to have him as the President of MANace.

All the talks are (or will be soon) archived on the wiki Andy created for the event. I gave one of the five minute talks. I actually managed to stick to five minutes. It sort of helped that the slideshow was advancing on autoplay. If you're interested in my "5 Minutes to Make A Difference" here is the slidecast:

Also available as a video archive from Ustream.tv: