Spent Friday (oh that was yesterday) supporting my fellow Munge Brothers doing some remote behind the scenes post production of the audio for the ‘So whats Changed’Â Conference.
Mike was doing a workshop there as well as juggling the recording for podcasts of the event. As he was spread thinly Brother Nick helped him out onsite in Sydney while I stayed home in Adelaide.
The work flow was something like Mike & Nick records session, Mike uploads while next session is going, I get upload file, download, snip, put intros on, check levels, export out as mp3s, add appropriate ID tags and upload the thing back where Mike grabs it and puts it along with blog post into the conference blog, hence creating an ‘as near as possible with asynchronous’ real-time feed of the proceedings.
I kept in ‘blind-touch’ with Mike/Nick via IM and SMS and email – whichever was working at the time. Mostly IM was best for me, as the feeling of flying blind can be quite strange. I had a good rundown of who would be speaking when and when the files would magically appear for me to munge, but the stream of backchannel communication was most important to clue in to what was happening.
Occassionly there were dropouts of the IM, so email and SMS were used to notify eah end where we were up to.
There were flurries of activity at times, obviously coinciding with speaker change-over times and other times I would just sit doing some other things while waiting for the nexrt onslaught. So, while it wasn’t a constant ‘on’ type of pressure, I was engaged and focused on the task from about 8am til 6pm. It was kind of a cocooned tunnel vision state I was in….and strangely I quite enjoyed it. (Thought: I wonder if this is a little part of the full-focused attention aphrodisiac that Linda Stone refers to)
The actual task was a bit complicated and messy my end due to me being between moving computers and so endedup doing different tasks on different computers. Certainly the process stands room for improvement. The lack of sleep and fighting a bit of an infection didn’t help matters either. But I purposely did not let the Brothers in on the hiccups this end – I knew they’d be having their own hassles (which, it turns out they did) and I just got on with producing the goods the best kludged way I could.
Now, I don’t know that much about the people behind the conference, Educationau, but it occured to me that these educators where takling coming to grips with how to do things in a ‘new media’, ‘markets are conversations‘ way. That in fact they were taking up the challenge of how to learn what Generation M already know and do. If I read between the lines correctly of JP’s blog, Confused of Calcutta, he too seems to be keenly aware, though maybe in a different context, of the challenges the current generation of ‘old farts’ like myself face in learning and catching up and preparing what we do for the new connected generation.Â
Sometimes it all seems very exciting to a alpha geek thinker like myself, but often….it’s just tiring! 
Goodnight.
technorati tags:eduaueventaug06, munge, cluetrain, generationm