MEMBERprofiles
A Most Outstanding Couple
T his is your typical love story. Only it isn’t. Lindy McKeown and
Randy Orwin met, fell in love,
and are now building a life
together. But it didn’t happen
in the ordinary way. They were
worlds apart when they “met,” he
on the West Coast of the United States
and she in Queensland, Australia. They
came together in Second Life (SL), and it was on
ISTE Island where they carved out a relationship over
2½ years.
They didn’t fall in love immediately, or at least they didn’t
think they did. It wasn’t until they spent time together last
summer at NECC in Washington, D.C., that they felt a
spark. Even then, they assumed they were caught up in the
excitement of the conference. They didn’t know the magic
was real until McKeown made a return trip to the United
States a month later.
But if you talked to them today, you’d swear they’ve always known each other.
They are both ISTE devotees, fervent ed tech enthusiasts,
and tireless advocates for excellence in teaching. Each has
a list of awards for outstanding achievement far too long to
list here in entirety.
McKeown has been named Outstanding Leader of the
Year by both ISTE and the Queensland Society for Information Technology in Education; she has been recognized
by the Go Women in Engineering, Science and Technology
at the University of Southern Queensland; and she’s received ISTE’s prestigious Making IT Happen pink jacket.
Orwin also has been awarded a Making IT Happen jacket,
and he was named a T.H.E. Journal Innovator. He’s a member
of 12 ISTE special interest groups, volunteers as an SL docent,
has presented at NECC numerous times, and has put on an
ISTE webinar on using open source in K– 12 schools.
He also owns K12opensourcehelp.com and specializes
in open source software, Moodle, e-learning, and Web 2.0
applications for the classroom.
ISTE Island where they carved out a relationship over
McKeown is an educational
consultant specializing in
virtual worlds, teacher pro-
fessional development, tech
integration, and e-learning.
She is currently working with
the University of Southern
Queensland to integrate virtual
worlds across the university.
With all those accolades you might think
there would be some competition between them.
Not so, they say.
“We are both very giving, and very open to constructive
criticism and how to do things another way,” Orwin says.
“We both thrive on learning and change.”
McKeown says they each have different areas of exper-
tise: “Randy has open source, and mine is virtual worlds.
But the common thread is integrating tech into teaching
and learning. The more we talk about things, the more I
realize that we are so aligned.”
The thread that keeps them aligned is technology, both
in a professional sense and a practical way.
The couple met on Christmas Eve 2006, when Orwin
created an SL account and found the newly created ISTE
Island. He checked to see if any ISTE people were online
and discovered Decka Ma, McKeown’s SL avatar.
“I spent the next few hours with her learning about SL
and the potential uses for educators,” Orwin recalls. “We
became fast friends.”
For the next couple of years they collaborated on a vari-
ety of educational projects but never met in person. They
stayed connected through SL, Skype, and Facebook. When
NECC 2009 rolled around, they finally met face to face and
spent a lot of time together. “We decided that we just might
like each other,” Orwin says.
A second meeting confirmed the connection. “We figured out that we had to do something,” Orwin says. “It
was amazing when she said she would move here from
Australia.”
—Diana Fingal is L&L’s senior editor.
