AHG Day #1 - afternoon

Nice plug from fellow ATHEN Sean Keegan - check out the ATHEN homepage at http://athenpro.org. Several ATHEN members will be posting messages at the ATHEN Blog as well as on the ATHEN site as to the different presentations we attend.

I will say that Part I of the AHEAD eText institute on policies and procedures was quite excellent this afternoon. I attended the first institute at AHEAD 2005 back in August and this one was even better - more advanced. Besides Ron and Gaeir being better practiced- having done it once already- it definitely helped me that I had been through it once already. I am one of those folks who has to hear something a couple of times before it sinks in - I was also better able to attend to the information details since they were not all new.

The other attendees I spoke with during the break and afterward were also very impressed - though most of our heads wer spinning with the sheer amount of information thrown at us. Fortunately the handouts are really good [these will be posted on-line very soon - check back for details]. In the meantime - for those of you who could not be there - a good bit of this information is available on the new AHEAD E-text Solutions Group webpage.*

The conference audience also helps. At AHEAD, most of the audience were administrators and newbies to this technology. AHG is kept small on purpose (less than 200 attendees) and we all seem to be techies of one sort or another. There are even a couple of other folks who are producing DAISY in-house. I am very much looking forward to the hand-on lab portion taking place all day Wednesday. One of the items we installed Monday evening was the new Dolphin Producer - essentially a pared down version of EasePublisher designed to work directly with MS-Word.

I also had a chance to chat with Caroline of Dolphin. If you do not know Caroline I recommend introducing yourself if the opportunity comes about - she is a computer linguist by trade and quite lovely to chat with no matter the topic.


*Correction to this page - the Boston University eText page has been updated with a new link - http://www.bu.edu/disability/policies/specific-textbooks.html - After this afternoon I may have a few tweaks to make in our policies & procedures - I am proud of our system - but there is always room for improvement.