Comments on the ASSET 2005 Conference, Huntington, NY March 14, 2005
I wrote these comments within hours of returning from the ASSET conference.  I could not recall some names and Session titles.

Keynote speaker:
John Abbott,  Human brain development begins in the last trimester of pregnancy.  Mother's stress levels directly affect infant brain devel.- capacity to learn as well as the first few years 0 - 3, and pre-k.   This   strongly supports the notion in Senge, Sustainability re: schools offering family services and community services, such as pre-natal, 0-3 support, health, legal, child care aide, etc.
Abbott quoted my line that at the end of the day, it should be the students who are tired not the teachers.

Bill's handheld session: a lot of interest - interactive with audience.  Mainly attended to watch my friend present.  Would have been even more effective if the PPT slide show had been presented with his Palm.  Announced at the end of the session  - "oh by the way, this is what I used for the presentation  (the Palm and the "slinger?"

Garage Band
Excellent seminar for introduction to Garage Band, from Bayshore teachers.  They are truly fluid with the product and excellent at presenting the basics in a well planned developmental way.  I stayed for two sessions (1 and 2).  I learned (finally) how to connect a midi device to my Powerbook G4 (with a Midi-to-USB) cable and how to connect a mike to Garage Band for voice input.

Two (or three) teachers plus at least two student aides were present all the time.  While one was talking, the others were walking around the room helping anyone who seemed to be stuck on the next step being demonstrted.  Occasionally one teacher would switch and would demo on the projected macintosh what the other instructor was describing.  It was a wonderful 1-2 combination of cooperative presenting. 
This would have made a PERFECT workshop for NetOP or the equivelent.  It was great that the presentors brought in all of this equipment, 20+ Mac Laptops, plus 20+ USB/Midi keyboards, plus 40+ earphones.  A  lot of schlepping and worth it for hands-on workshop.  Most valuable.

Vendor conversation with Open Sessions:
We talked about using their fiber optic network throughout Long Island and some of their LI school districts clients to form a User Group Network and to connect this school network with the (Brookhaven?) Lab that is also a customer to provide telementoring.  It would be very similar to the Motorola mentoring project described in Senge. (New Orleans, or East St. Louis, or ...?)  but with the addition of electronic connections. This could be a project supported by EEV.  I suspect that Open Sessions would welcome the idea.

Session IV
Video Conferencing using Horizon Live from Stoney Brook to Taiwan.  It is a telementoring (remote learning) system that puts a Stonybrook professor, Dr. Tian-Lih Teng, Professor, Department of Technology and Society, College of Engineering & Applied Science (Ted.teng@stonybrook.edu) in the homes of Tawanese students.  Questions relating to simple classroom to classroom audio video collaboration were evaded.  Professor Teng kept bringing me back to one way video, one way audio, two way chat/IM.
While the Stonybrook team was very proud of their distance learning program, I believe the technology they are using will be superceeded soon. 
Bill K and I sat in this session and engaged the Professor Teng in a wonderful dialog after the session.  Bill and I talked of visiting Stonybrook to see their distance learning in action some day.