This Burrito Doesn’t Have to End

As my alarm went off at 3:30 am and the prospect of heading to the Portland airport became more than an abstract concept, I experienced my own burrito sadness. The end of HighEdWeb14 had me a little misty.

My batteries are recharged and I’m raring to get back to work and try some of the great ideas that I found in Portland. But, at the same time Geek Camp was over. This wonderful merry go round of knowledge and laughter was coming to a stop and it was time to get off.

It seemed very much like a Tenth Doctor moment.

Portland was just incredible and it was a huge shot in the arm.

The venues for the evening activities were awesome. There were Voodoo Doughnuts. There was Karaoke from Hell. Cornhole. A tree that had grown up around an abandoned .22-caliber rifle.

Conversations that proved useful to my job started in Chicago before my connection to PDX. There were serious conversations. There were flat-out silly ones. There were spontaneous games of Cards Against Humanity.

The city is beautiful. The amount of things to do, seemingly limitless. And don’t get me started about the beer. I’ll break the Internet.
Every session I attended seemed build on top of the one before, wave after wave of useful information crashing over me. Dave Cameron’s best of conference presentation made me feel 100% human again. I got to think about the web as evolving organism. Moira Gunn was thought-provoking and Chris Hardwick brought the house down.

And the Taco Question took us to a level of staggering geekitude unreached in my previous 5 national conferences. It. Was. Glorious.
Thinking about not having that any more was getting me a little down. But it didn’t take long for a fellow high-ed webber to pick me back up. (Thanks, Chris D’Orso. Well done.)

As I read Chris’s response and smiled it occurred to me that the HighEdWeb burrito does not end. We can enjoy that burrito everyday, through the collective power of the people that make up HighEdWeb.

This community of geeks is the most welcoming, caring and collaboratively minded group of professionals I’ve come across. Someone is always willing to answer a question, be a sounding board for an idea, or offer up a piece of code or a recipe to help you accomplish something. A smile-inducing joke or meme to pick you up on a rough day is just a tweet away.

There’s a slew of great resources (<shameless plug>such as Link </shameless plug>) in the HighEdWeb membership and there’s soon to be a new layer, with the announcement that targeted white papers will soon be available to members.
Sometimes we forget just how special all that is. But its rare in the rest of the workaday world.

Avail yourself of those resources. Be a resource for others. Tweet, email, pick up the phone. (Track me down, if I can help). Keep those connections firing. It will make your job easier and more awesome. And it will make you smile.

Enjoy your burrito. Today, and always.

 

Photo from Flickr User Ruth Hartnup via a CC license.