Istanbul and Ankara

This time a blog in English, because I want my new Turkish friends to be able to read it.

Last week I was with my collegues Willy, Klaas Jan and Jos in Istanbul and Ankara. Due to the fog in Amsterdam, our flight was delayed and we arrived late in Istanbul Tuesday evening. However, we had a nice walk through a part of the city and were overwhelmed by the view of an ancient Mosquee, friendly people and a place where people smoked water-pipe. I’m a non-smoker, but I tried it a bit (and I did inhale!).
It was a nice experience.

In Ankara we were heartily welcomed by our hosts of the Hacettepe University. At our arrival a party was going on, which included dancing. I like dancing, so….
The next day the Conference ‘Information management in a changing world’ started with international speakers. Good papers, including the paper presented by my colleague Jos van Helvoort about information literacy in relation to the changing technology. Afterwards he was complimented by the key-note speaker Joan Lippincott.

I had the opportunity to give a short poster-presentation about our 10 weeks course ‘Werken 2.0, a course about the way social media contributes to the new way of working.
It was scheduled at the end of the day, so there wasn’t much audience, but I got nice feedback afterwards.
The next day some asked me more about my poster and even invited me to come to their country to tell the whole story! We’ll see what comes.
All the papers will by published by Sprinter Verlag, I will use them in my lessons.

The conference was very well organized with the support of many students of the faculty of information management. At the end of the conference we thanked the students for their positive and energetic attitude.
Back in Holland my Facebook is full of friendship requests and many people share their photos with each other. I’m still enjoying the trip.
This was my first visit to Turkey, and it won’t be the last!