I flew into Houston, Texas yesterday for the 21st Annual Visitor Studies Association conference. This is my first time in Space City, as well as the Lone Star State, for that matter. This morning, I presented a workshop with Jes Koepfler, a fellow Museum Studies grad and my “partner in crime” on the Mischief & Malice: Crime in the Museum online exhibition project (we co-managed this project put together by the University of Toronto’s Master of Museum Studies Class of 2008 using a wiki). Appropriately, we presented Using Wikis for Project Management. It’s our second collaboration for this topic; we led a similar workshop in May at the inaugural Technology in the Arts: Canada conference that happened in Waterloo, Ontario. Jes and I are both pleased with how the workshop went today and are looking forward to receiving feedback on our performance via the eval forms :-)

Houston and its residents are treating me very well so far. The folks at Rice University, where we presented our workshop, were particularly nice. Door to door service in a golf cart and a computer lab loaded with coffee, water, and treats--what more could you ask for at 8:30am? The city is home to a large museum district, which I’m looking forward to checking out tomorrow night as part of the conference’s opening event, “Dinner, Dancing, and Dialogue”. The evening will begin with cocktails and hors d'oeuvres at the Children's Museum of Houston. Then it's on to fine dining among masterpieces at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where attendees also will see a performance by the Houston-based Hope Stone Dance Company, who, I’m told, created an interpretation especially for VSA to stimulate further dialogue. The night will wrap up with dessert and dancing under the dinosaurs at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.