Jeff Pointek Selected ISTE2010 Keynote

Hawaii Technology Academy's Jeff Pointek has been selected to open up ISTE 2010 in Denver, Colorado June 27-July 2. The selection process gave all 85,000+ members of ISTE a voice in the pick, and I didn't vote for him: I personally wanted Chris Lehmann to open up onstage about his creative and forward-thinking work at Philadephia's Science Leadership Academy. However, I will admit that Pointek was a close runner-up for my vote, since he is the one keynote nominee I have not seen or heard present. Heck, ISTE stacked the deck for success with a tidy collection of stellar options that included the two I've already mentioned, along with Alan November, Peter H. Reynolds, and Gary Stager. I'm glad that democracy has had its way and we should have a stirring keynote address from Jeff Pointek to light the fire in Denver.

There's been a bit of twitterbuzz the past couple days following the announcement, as folks try unsuccessfully to find an article referenced during the selection process, and to streamline things I'll embed what is not actually an "article" but a web "artifact," Pointek's slideshare entitled:

Cape

View more presentations from jeffrey piontek.

See you in Denver!!!

Ah SlideShare--GOT ME!

(crosspost from Oh!VirtualLearning!)I got an email from SlideShare.com yesterday that read:
Hi scottmerrick,

We've noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of
views in the last 24 hours. Great job ... you must be doing something right.
;-)
Why don't you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we
can track the conversation.
Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team

When I visited the slideshare site to check my view count, I was amazed to see that it had garnered over 20,000 views in less than a month! Wow! I of course got all excited and emailed my Vanderbilt CSO team the great news that my Second Life slidecast, the entire 45 minute online version of my presentation "Why Second Life" had become famous!

Then this morning I visited SlideShare again to find my view count had been reset to its actual (and still moderately impressive, I'd submit) 246. What happened? Ah, I thought, googling "slideshare april fools." The result?

Happy April Fools day
Apr 1, 06:12 am PST
We celebrated April Fools Day with a little prank: views on your presentations have an extra two zeros on them. We hope you find this funny. Your views will be rolled back to normal in a few hours.
You can see tweets about this prank on twitter …
we asked people to mark their tweets with #bestofslideshare
in an email we sent out. We sincerely apologize if we annoyed you … we notice from the reactions on twitter that some people are not amused.
Update: We’ve always loved our users and will continue to do so in future,
the joke notwithstanding. If our prank upset you, we’re sorry.
Update Again: Actual view counts have now been restored. Its all over and back to normal!

Funny! Excepting, of course, for my having to pump out another email to my group apologizing for my gullibility. Ah, well, good job SlideShare!