Yesterday, my colleague Ryan Bender noted to me that it has been a year since I’ve posted anything here. A year. I can barely remember the last 20 or so months, so I imagine it is fair to say that I have been unavoidably detained dealing with a few other things. With that said, it is probably time to dust off the old blog and see what happens if I do what I used to do with great frequency — write.
For some reason I decided to take a look through a bunch of my old friends’ sites this morning. Yes, people still blog and it was really great to catch up on some old voices from the dawn of the ed tech/Internet boom. One of my all time favorite people is a guy named D’Arcy Norman. He is the Associate Director, Learning Technologies & Design, in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Calgary. He is a lot more than that, but that is his current gig. He was one of the first voices I discovered on the Internet back at the dawn of Web 2.0. He wrote about a time back in the day that he sent an email to Steve Jobs and got a response.
It made me reflect on the many opportunities I have had to visit the Fruit Company that D’Arcy speaks about in his post. Back in 1999, Apple was a very different company. They had barely survived being bought by a handful of companies, the stock price was ridiculously low, and innovation was not something that they were known for at the time. Steve had recently come back and was putting his stamp on the place. As a part of that, I believe Steve brought John Couch back to lead up the Apple Higher Education team and he immediately got to work identifying ed tech people to help him think about new strategies. It was an exciting time to be a fan of Apple, watch them get their mojo back, and realize a dream of getting to work with them.
One could imagine that it was a thrill getting to go to Apple at a very early part of my career at Penn State to not just be part of an executive briefing, but to actually get to present things we were building at the IST Solutions Institute. It was even more exciting to get invited back over and over again to work with all sorts of brilliant people both inside and outside of Apple. From the Apple Digital Campus project, the release of the first iTunes U, to getting to actually go into various buildings on their campus to meet with product teams and inform future products. It was always a humbling and amazing experience getting to work with them.
And here is the full circle back to D’Arcy, it was at one of those early Apple dinners that I met D’Arcy in real life for the first time after several years of interacting with him online as a commenter on his blog. He proved to be even smarter and cooler in person, but it is nice to know he is only a URL away.
