The first day of the last Hackers On Planet Earth conference is over and the second is beginning now.

I started late at the conference, dallying at home for the morning and early afternoon. I arrived on-site about 2pm, then proceeded to sit and type away on the HOPE wifi for another hour-and-a-half before remembering why I was there. I paid my $80 conference fee (tax deductible… or death!), performed a cursory tour of the Exposition area, then went up to the 18th floor to listen to the presentations.

Of the four that I saw, I found Hacking the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer: Something About Education to be the most satisfying. Gillian Andrews’ presented the information with style and humor, making up for the absence of her parnter Ivan Krstic. The discussion focused on

…the critical element in teaching with technology is people - and that hackers need to consider what this means. The talk will encourage the audience to consider the best ways to tackle the horrendous failures of current technology education. Topics to be covered: Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age/Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer and whether it can be achieved; the one laptop per child project and the difficulties it currently faces; hair-raising experiences writing an A+ certification curriculum; whether the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus is real; responses from seventh-graders (or Why Johnny Can’t Read on the Internet); and Richard Feynman already taught us everything we needed to know about education - why aren’t we listening?

An audio recording of the talk will be posted online later.

I sat in on other talks such as Macro Social Engineering and Hackers and Planet Earth. The material presented was less-satisfying and the presenters themselves seemed novices at public speaking, or at least very introverted individuals bravely standing before attentive crowds. Nice guys though.

I left around 9:30pm, much to my later regret. I missed out on Hacking the Body: Pleasure, a presentation on sex and teledildonics; I also missed the 11pm electronic music and visualization expo, which is ironically what I left the conference to find elsewhere.

Catch up on posts from the conference with the #thelasthope (official) and #HOPE (unofficial) tags on Twitter.