After the Oakville ARC breakfast, I spent Saturday at PodCamp Toronto 2014, an "unconference" for...well... anyone associated with communicating on the web.

There were some excellent sessions I attended, with topics ranging from engaging with your audience to the depths of Google Analytics.

i learned a great deal in a short time, and, as I do at unconferences, never in a way I expected to.

This got me thinking about how I learn and about how other hams learn. Two conclusions:

1) Personality is as important as content when conveying technical information to a semi technical audience. A big personality opens my mind to absorbing more.

I think this rule is particularly important in distance education, as I am proposing as one of our Southern Ontario "Moonshots". We need to attract the best instructors, armed with the best content we can lay our hands on.

I just received additional materials this week from our good friends at Coax Publications to enhance their wonderful Basic Qualification book. We can be very proud of this excellent Ontario publishing team. There are further discussions to be had, but I believe the Coax materials are a great foundation for an Ontario hosted remote learning Basic Qualification course.

2) I'm beginning to think we should host an unconference for Amateur Radio. Our community is so varied and so talented that the unconference model is a natural. I'll write some additional thoughts on this soon.