cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog and cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

It’s been a week since returning from Barcelona, where I was like 5 Yahtzees in a row luck enough to be a part of the Open EdTech 2009 summit co-organized by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the New Media Consortium (NMC). I remember hearing the raves of the 2008 meeting from my colleagues that got to go.

This was actually my first trip to Europe since attending a Geology conference in Germany back in 1990. It seems patently obvious, but was slightly eye widening in a place where (a) there is visible history going back 3 or 4 times the history of the US and (b) the driving distance proximity of different speaking and culturally’historically countries makes for a different feel than we get in what can seem like ironically isolated vastness of our large country, where it takes a multiple day trip to get to a different culture.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Even for a small example is this city’s monument sized honor of Christopher Columbus, being the place where he gave his “report card” to Isabella and Ferdinand after his first foray into America, while over here, he is either painted as cartoon schoolbook hero or a villainous fraud.