JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY
A Blogging Workshop
With Windows: Life without walls
In order to develop a community of enthusiastic people who would love to blog about latest happenings and share knowledge in the field of internet, communication and web technology, Microsoft MDP Nepal on march 22nd and 23rd organized a long awaited and much expected blogging workshop with a theme ‘A Blogging workshop with Windows: Life without walls’ at Staff College, Jawalakhel in Kathmandu. The event was one of its kind and probably held for the first time in Nepal.
The day one was targeted for the whole community of enthusiastic people who would have already started blogging in space, provided they had the requisite skill to do same. While the 2nd day was exclusively meant for the Nepalese MSPs (Microsoft Student partners) from different engineering and IT colleges.
March 22, 2009:
The workshop kicked off at 10:00am by an introductory speech from Mr. Allen Bailochan Tuladhar, Country Manager, Microsoft MDP Nepal. It was cool to find science, environment and technology minister Er. Ganesh Shah attending the workshop and share his comprehension on different issues associated with blogs and blogging ( honorable minister is often regarded as ‘Blog Mantri’ by techie community as he is distinctly known to be ahead among other ministers in blogging and using web services to express himself in front of the general public). Honorable minister addressed the participants of the workshop and asked everyone to start blogging and emailing if he really wanted to speak to nation instead of following the predominant rowdy trends. He also urged all to start commenting upon his activities and give suggestions to him as well so that he could step forward to right direction and listen to the public voices.
Then it was time for the so called blog guru Mr. Suran Maharjan from Xplore International to begin his presentations and video clippings right from the rudiments of creating blog spaces and blogging to learning open access, social media, web 2.0, content communities, podcasts etc… Mr. Maharjan talked about the whole lot of peculiar topics which we never came across including folksonomies and second life. And yes, forget about those other topics that bounced directly over the head unnoticeably.
Mr. Allen Bilochan Tuladhar sir time and again came up to the floor and had a spell bounding session on Windows Live features, web slices, RSS 2.0, IE8, accelerator, inprivate browsing etc. through his stunning PowerPoint slides. The next moment witnessed a session on Windows live @ edu program by Mr. Deepak Neupane Sir from Microsoft MDP Nepal. It was yet more exciting to learn that Microsoft, as a part of its academic initiatives was providing private email account services to all the students on the college’s name as its domain for absolutely free of cost. The blogging sessions however continued on and on in between other cool setups.
March 23, 2009:
As expected, the next day blogging workshop started at 10 am in the morning at Kathmandu Engineering College, Kalimati.The approach to continue the workshop this day was pretty different from what it was yesterday as it was absolutely hands on; everybody with a laptop in hand and connected without restriction; no walls, only windows! J. Most significantly, only the 59 MSPs and one faculty from each college were entertained today.
All MSPs looked so passionate to learn and carry on with the Paint.NET, DeepZoom __ yes of course; everybody had their photo sessions (With each MSP holding an A4 white board in the landscape position by the chest) one by one for the DeepZoom Project. Not to forget, we were absolutely running short of power due to load shedding (although we were running on generator, it had its own limitations, Boo…!J). We were reluctantly forced to skip few interesting sessions and this was a bit weird.
Afternoon witnessed a session by our blog master on various topics including wiki, E-forum and different popular blogspaces. Apart from the sermon by our blog guru, it was rather thrilling to learn loads of Windows live features and blogging at spaces.live.com from the country manager, Microsoft Nepal. The next scheduled plan for the day was session on Office Live Workspace, which is still a beta, being presented by Network specialist Er. Ganesh Joshi, Microsoft Nepal. A pretty long discussion on MSP program and the fundamental directives to all the MSPs were delivered by our Community Lead Er. Shailendra Jha at the end of all the formal session.
All in all, the 2-day long workshop was a big hit for me after all the entire event loaded us with lots of amazing discoveries; and this followed up with the packing of logistics we had set up. And, finally we all had a great photo session in the premises of the college.
It was really cool to share the MSP moment together.
Yes, MSPs rocked the floor and danced the Microsoft rhythm!
PS: It was a sad news to learn what Udhyan sir was going through. Don’t worry sir! Life’s like this. It sucks when; u never know.