A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at the 9th ETIC – Encontro de Educação e Tecnologias da Informação e Comunicação (Education and ICT Meeting) – at the University Estácio de Sá, UNESA, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This is an yearly meeting organised by the ICT in Education Group (TICPE) of the Post-Graduate Programme in Education of UNESA, and the event is now fully established across the country as a meeting point for all post-graduate students in Education. In previous years they had great line-ups of excellent external speakers, according to a format of morning talks by guests, followed by afternoon paper and poster presentations by students as well as discussions.
This year there were four main talks by external speakers, who discussed experiences in Distance Learning in Europe (it’s relevant to add that Distance Learning is only slowly acquiring legitimacy in Brazil, following governmental legislation dated 1996 – and ‘slowly’ seems to be the operative word), each focusing on a different institution. Three of those were presented via FM (FlashMeeting), a Web 2.0 videoconferencing tool developed at the Knowledge Media Institute at the UK Open University. I was the last and the only presenter actually there, and, since I was also part of the organising committee, I must confess it was the first talk I ever gave where I was 100% relaxed from the very beginning 
We were, well, relying quite heavily on the technology (though we did have a Plan B – and C…), so I got that ‘mission-accomplished’ feeling as soon as the discussion following the third talk was over… So, everything worked nicely, making, overall, for a great opportunity to meet new people and get to hear about some really interesting and relevant work.
The programme is available here, where there are links to replays of the FM talks as well my own presentation, which I’ve shared here (but, hey, embedding from Slideshare doesn’t seem to be working …)
