Live from Chicago

This week I am at AERA, the biggest conference in the world for educators, educational researchers, teachers, administrators, etc. We’re meeting this year in a cluster of hotels downtown, where the weather has made us all miserable.

I managed to carve out a little space at Borders Books on Michigan Avenue–a place I’ve been a few hundred times–to answer emails and work. TMobile still manages to piss me off with it’s $10-a-day fee for web access and Borders is equally negligible in its ability to provide electrical outlets, but I’m managing ok.

On a personal note, it’s been great to be here with all my best girlfriends from graduate school. It’s the first time we’ve all been together post-PhD, and it’s fun to talk about our jobs, our research, and our new hometowns. We got a couple of adjoining hotel rooms and are loving the suite-like feel of it all, running back and forth and going in-and-out of conversations. These women are the most amazing friends I’ve ever had, and I hope we’re always able to get together like this. It’s truly amazing how Jim managed to unite us all.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be on a panel with our group of friends doing research on games. We’ve done this panel a few times at AERA before, and each year they put us in a larger room. This year will perhaps be the largest audience we’ll get. I’m anticipating that many folks from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Learning Initiative will be there so it will be fun to show off all the good stuff we’re doing at MIT and at Wisconsin.

More details to follow!