My Brain Hurts

Today was for registering, an opening keynote and function. Over 15 000 people are expected to register this year.

The keynote was by James Surowiecki who spoke about the Wisdom of Crowds. Though moderately interesting there probably wasn’t an hours worth of educational relevance in what he had to say – I’m sure it was jet lag that made the lady next to me fall asleep half way through. He spoke very well and had some interesting anecdotes but the educational message was fairly narrow. He spoke about the power of the collective knowledge of many people, which relates fairly well to Wikipedia. 

He mentioned the jelly bean experiment – allow a large number of people to guess how many jelly beans in a jar – the average of all their answers will be very close to the real answer. Possible the best example as his tale of the US submarine Scorpion which sank in the 1960 and could not be found by conventional search methods. A think tank of many experts was brought together to develop possible scenarios for its location. All suggestions were examined in detail by the group and combined into a most likely chain of events which did not reflected the thoughts of any one person. It was found just over 200meteres from the location they suggested. Singularly no-one was even close but collectively they solved the problem.

This was followed by the first poster session – over 30 booths showcasing projects of interest happening within their schools. Each is of interest to different groups of people.  For this session most were pretty bland, one group was showing examples of student work that combined video, digital stills and web based presentations which was interesting.

Being night one supper was provided along with a band and a hoe down. The food in this part of the world is very much Tex Mex – lots of tasty food and after hearing this on TV for many years I now know what a tomale is. It appears to be mashed food inside a corn husk which I discovered is not exactly edible. I guessed it had to be unwrapped to be eaten, I really should have watched what others were doing. Also the jalapeno tomale was not a very wise choice.