Canadie la belle

I've been sidelined the past two weeks by Lerna, the e-Framework, and seasonal malaise that may or may not be porcine-related. Not necessarily in that order. So even if I had much to say on this blog, I wasn't really going to get around to it.

I have noted with some concern the dearth of blog posts on opɯcɯlɯklɑr, when I am not overseas mangling the French language. I have decided to take action, to remedy this unfortunate state of affairs, by finding a suitable member of la Francophonie to mangle the French language in.

Argal know ye, ye people, that from the 11th to the 23rd inst., I shall be in Canadia, and more particularly, in the fair city of Montréal, trying to talk to the locals in French, and getting annoyed responses in English from the francophones, anglophones, and allophones there. I will also make a side trip to Toronto, where me attempting to speak in French will be even more pointless, but will probably not provoke so visceral a reaction.

In truth, of course, I am not funded by the Commonwealth to travel for the purposes of ruining Canado-Australian relations through blogging. I am instead attending an IMS Workshop, on e-learning technology standards, which includes work that I've been involved in through Link Affiliates.

So my work blog Interoppo Research—which also gets pretty quiet when I'm not attending a conference—will once again turn into a conference diary. (If you don't know what e-learning technology standards are, don't start trying to find out by my conference diary, it will presuppose some knowledge. There'll be a posting or two on the Link Affiliates blog once all is done, explaining things more helpfully.)

In blogging the workshop, I will once again prove myself three years behind the rest of the world, since everyone else there will be twittering the workshop. Me, I was in the Humanities too long for 140 characters at a time; and I'm too senile and not-with-it to see how Twitter back-chatter is informative to anyone not physically there.

But assuming my evenings are free (which is problematic, given the prime location of my accommodation midtown)—

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—and further assuming the following weekend into Tuesday afternoon have me alert and online, I will be penning inaccurate and ill-thought out reflections on la belle Canadie. Who knows, I may even work out how to spell it correctly...