I am in California (Anaheim or to be really precise, Garden Grove) for the Association for Educational Communication and Technology conference. There's an odd disjunction (mentioned by Stephen Downes in his opening keynote Wednesday night) between the sedate academic atmosphere of the conference and the natural disaster taking place all around us. While Anaheim proper has not been hit by the wildfires, you can smell and often see the smoke from them when you are outside. The view flying into John Wayne Airport was even more striking. It's strange to have that kind of destruction hovering just at the edge of your consciousness while sitting in a presentation on, for example, knowledge life-cycles.

For a variety of reasons (ranging from the technical setup of Donut Age to my preference for taking paper notes in conference sessions), I'm not making any kind of attempt to blog the conference per se, but I have been using Twitter to (briefly) log my conference experience and del.icio.us to post interesting URLs from sessions. For these, my iPhone (and especially Hahlo, Twitter "client" for iPhone) has been extremely useful. Much less cumbersome (and less conspicuous) than hauling out my laptop every time something I want to post something. I spent the first two days of the conference dragging my laptop around anyway ("just in case"), but today, it's staying in the room and I'm relying on the iPhone alone to keep me connected. If nothing else, it's making my right shoulder happier.