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ISTE Daily Leader Day 4, 2010. Page 10 http://center.uoregon.edu/ISTE/2010/glance/pdfs/DL2010-day4-web.pdf

Virtual Conference Goers Access ISTE 2010 from Three States By Lewis Taylor

Delivering an entire day’s worth of conference content—workshops, keynotes, concurrent sessions, playgrounds, and posters—to remote sites in three cities, as well as roughly 50 other virtual conference goers, isn’t something that comes together overnight.

“Typically it’s an eight- to nine-month project,” says Craig Mollerstuen, volunteer program chair for Remote ISTE. “As with everything, if you get a good group of people—people with experience and skills—who all are working together toward the same direction, you can make just about anything happen.”

For four years, Mollerstuen, an Anchorage, Alaska, resident, has been making Remote ISTE happen. Developed by the Special Interest Group for Interactive Video Conferencing (SIGIVC), the initiative serves the dual role of bringing ISTE 2010 to people who couldn’t make it to Denver and demonstrating best practices in video conferencing.

On Tuesday, Remote ISTE went out to virtual attendees in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia as well as about 50 others. Dawn Colavita, SIGIVC secretary and a video host for Remote ISTE, called this year’s event a success. In addition to a concurrent session hosted by Alan November, the day’s simulcast included a keynote, a hands-on workshop, and a virtual visit to a playground and a poster session.

Colavita said Mollerstuen brings all the pieces together. “Craig has a vision, and he pushes us further than we sometimes want to go, but it’s always good,” she said.

Mollerstuen says the friendships he makes and the network he builds is plenty of compensation for the hours he volunteers on behalf of Remote ISTE.

That doesn’t surprise Pam Lloyd, Mollerstuen’s coworker at the Alaska telecommunications company GCI. “It’s typical of how he is when he’s got passion about something,” she said. “He’s got a love—a passion—for video conferencing.”