It’s easily taken the 20+ years I have known Dean Shareski to figure out the secret to be on his podcast — I had to be a Canadian, which is something I finally accomplished in September 2019. The big moment for my fame happened April 22, when we met at the Hive Coffee Shop on Main Street in Moose Jaw (which now has a new name I forget) to record an episode of his CanadianEd Leadership podcast.
(locals may notice that at about 21 minutes into the show when a stream of people walk in the background by as part of the Tunnels of Moose Jaw tour)
This was actually a re-do as one we had recorded earlier online something glitched with the audio, just as well because I think this conversation was better. Besides, it was an excuse to meet up in town.
We got to talking about my work at Open Education Global, banter about of course GenAI, the state as it were of social media, that there’s still goodness on the ‘net, how I got to Moose Jaw from Arizona, and a good chunk of how we really first connected, on digital (and non) storytelling. If you make it to the last question you will find I’ve been a a place in Saskatchewan that Dean (a native) has not been.
I’ve known Dean online through first the edtech bloggers to sometime in the mid or early 2000s, there really was a gold era then of Canadian ed tech folks I was fortunate to connect with through really just blogs, like for instance Dean, Rob Wall, and Alec Couros, way ahead of the curve on podcasting, had a long run of the EdTech Posse podcast “talking about education, especially from a Saskatchewan point of view.”
Sometime in 2006? 2007, definitely in 2008, Dean would email me with a requests be be a guest in his course at University of Regina to do talks on digital storytelling. The routine was an email would arrive from Dean with a subject line of “Me Again with a Favour?” Would that have been in the days of Elluminate? nope I think it was Skype and ustream.tv. I know I did one in 2008 while I was working remotely (for NMC) while house sitting in Iceland. It might have been this one or earlier that one of his students was Cori Saas, now my wife, she too then an active teacher blogger I connected with in the era.
Actually on the transCanada segment of my 2011 CogDogOdyssey road trip, on crossing Saskatchewan, I got to visit and stay wth all three of the original EdTech Posse folks. Here I had Dean do a Young Me/Now Me photo thing (was that a Ze Frank routine?) on that visit.
Dean was Canadian nice and gracious in talking about my various storytelling projects over the years. When he asked one that was a stand out for me, I was pleased to hear in response that he still makes use of Pechaflickr, heck it’s been too long since I tried it (yup, it still works).
I’m not sure I had too much profound to say on Dean’s show, but at least it was not all just the old web geezers show. Conversations, especially at coffee shops or as we also have done here on walks, are really the best kinds of connections one can have. The stuff we did than still matters now, just in a different, a more evolved, and often unanticipated context. We both agree on the value of storying.
Let’s coffee meet again, Dean, ok? The best thing is knowing I cracked the code 😉
Featured Image: Unlocked flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license with irony a photo taken when I lived in Arizona and knew not the code.
