I remember with unpleasant memories the task of having to write the “What I did this summer” essay in September every year of grade school. I thought I would pre-empt the pressure by getting it out of the way in early August!

I mostly wanted to share the scene (below) that I ‘ve been staring at every morning from the deck of my Father-in-laws cabin on Allen Lake, near Blind River, Ontario.

It is a wonderful place and though Telus mobility reached my wife Susan’s cell phone out on the end of the dock, I was blissfully unable to connect to either a phone or the net for a couple of weeks. But of course, I did peddle the 8K to the local pub when I really needed an Internet fix.

In this ‘blended holiday’ I did write a forward to an upcoming Networking book Exploring the Theory, Pedagogy and Practice of Networked Learning  (sigh, not Open access), prepare for an inotroduction to the keynote of Clark Quinn at the Madison conference, read a book on educational research (way too American) and another on chaos theory BUT  spent lots of time just reading fiction  (really enjoyed Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce – Athabasca’s first ‘writer in virtual residence’) swimming and visting with new and old friends – including (of course, my wife and best friend Susan).

I’m now at the annual Madison Distance Learning and Teaching conference and looking forward to meeting a colleage and ex student Terumi Mitazoe from Japan. Terumi and I have published 3 articles, a book chapter and a co-authored a book, but have yet to meet F2F. She has expanded upon my “Equivalency Theory” and is creating a site with various studies that have validated the ideas in that early 2003 work  So Friday we present together this combined work.

Then my summer ends with 6 days of sailing off the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia. tough life…..