OK everyone, it has been about a week since I last wrote. So did you guess what the Ocean Girl was all about?

Drum roll please…

Baywatch!

Surprised? I sure was. I suppose Pam Anderson’s plastic chest is much more influential than I first thought. I guess sex sells no matter what culture you are talking about.

Well I must say that I had a good week. It was highlighted by our meeting with the Project Director on Thursday. I found out after the meeting that this was actually the first time the local consultants had met with him. Until now he never had time for this particular project. Go figure huh? Anyway the meeting went really good. Lani and I did most of the presenting with the local consultants stepping in to do their things as well. It was a great team effort and the Project Director seems very pleased with the progress that we are making. He is very much into building human capital and was pleased that we intend to train the folks here to do the training so they can carry this thing when we leave in December. Everyone left the meeting very jazzed and excited especially one of the local consultants who was patting me on the back and basically as happy as a lark. It is no wonder that he is the politically oriented one in the group.

The preparation for the presentation was a little haphazard though. Many things are done at the last minute here. I don’t particularly like it but I am well versed in the Tao of Procrastination. I just went with the flow and tied up all the loose ends for the presentation. No problems.

The other big highlight of the week is that my mentor is now in NM. I am on my own out here in Sri Lanka. This is going to be quite the adventure. I had very mixed feelings about her leaving during the earlier part of the week. I was scared, happy, liberated, excited, and all kinds of other emotions all over the place. It was quite the roller coaster. However, I believe that I have settled in and I am good with the current situation. Now is my time to shine and I intend to do my thing and make sure that when she returns in December she will be very impressed.

The first order of business is going to be to give a presentation on Tuesday. I am doing 2 sessions. One will be on the evolution of online learning and the other will be on the best practices of multimedia design. They will be fairly simple but my biggest challenge is going to be the activity based stuff. I am a great speaker but I am still perfecting my classroom management skills. For the first presentation I plan to give some simple examples of tutorials and simulations. So this is not going to be a big deal. For the other one I plan to get people into groups of about 3. There are 7 best practices I have to present so after I present them along with some examples, I will turn it over to the group to get into their small teams and discuss the assigned principle. One person from each group will report back at the end of the activity. Good stuff. Like I said my issue isn’t in designing or speaking the stuff it is in actually executing it. I look forward to the challenge.