conference
The Open Education 2008 Scholarship winners have been selected! This year’s winners are:
- John Britton, Chinese University of Hong Kong (student)
- Philise Rasugu, African Virtual University
- Julian Sukmana Putra, Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia (student)
- Stian Haklev, Norway
- Robert Boyczuk, Seneca College, Toronto
Congratulations to the winners and to everyone who applied - we had about thirty applicants for five scholarships, and the judging was tough! Also, many, many thanks to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for their continued support of the Open Ed scholarships.
Finally, the Open Ed 2008 program is now available online. The speakers and topics for this year are incredible… This should be the best Open Ed conference ever! =)
The 3 days in Saskatoon for TLt2008 were absolutely fantastic. It’s fun turning into “conference D’Arcy” - the side of me that is ever so slightly less antisocial and reclusive - the side that seems to show up at conferences. Not sure why that is, but it’s something I’ve noticed for years now. Maybe it’s the sense of being “away” - one part vacation, one part safe place to let loose.
I’ve had some of the most interesting, stimulating, and just plain conversations. All of which occurred off-site, while hanging out in neighbouring pubs, coffee shops, or just walking. I’m not going to list names because that makes it sound like some stupid elitist club, and what was so great about these conversations is that they were nothing like that. Newcomers. Academics. Lay-people. Teachers. Students. Geeks. It just didn’t matter. And it was awesome.
One of the highlights of the official conference portion had to be Brian Lamb’s live mashup. This was something that many of the conference attendees were likely to have never seen before - and I think a good chunk of the attendees didn’t realize that it was actually a live performance on stage, and not just a visualization. But, really, how many other conference presenters go the extra mile, bringing their own rented audio amp and even a cowbell on a stand? Hard. Core.
After the mashup intro, Brian gave a great presentation on openness, sharing, and riffed on some pretty deep topics. He even pulled in Harry to help tug at the heart strings.
Rick Schwier gave a fantastic talk, sharing some wonderful advice and stories. Dean Shareski followed the theme with another fantastic talk called Share Everything, and managed to cover some of the ideology behind sharing while providing concrete and pragmatic examples and strategies.
George Siemens gave something like 14 presentations during the conference, citing some pretty profound neurological research studies in the process (I’m eagerly awaiting his pending publication of the Theory of the Universal Male Brain). He was extremely eloquent in describing the nature of connectedness, what connectivism could mean to education, and why networks (and Networks) matter.
As Scott Leslie noted on Flickr, George is another person who talks with his hands. He’s such a natural, engaging, and conversational speaker, and it is a joy to hear him share his stuff.
Stephen Downes blew some minds when he took the stage to talk about The Future. His presentation was amazing on so many levels - he was talking about futurism and predictions, but that’s not really what the presentation was about. It was about individuals taking control back. It was about not sitting passively, of crafting a future that you want, rather than waiting for The Future to be handed down to you. And he modeled some extremely engaging and brave presentation techniques - things that I am quite sure most of the people attending have never seen again.
He gave the big presentation screens to the audience. And not in some half-assed lame lip service manner. He quite literally gave control of the web page that was being displayed on the big screens to anyone with a web browser. He was running Edu_RSS, and was using a portion of the app that let people post any text (or HTML snippets) to be put into a queue to be displayed for 10 seconds in a large font on the big screen.
It’s something extremely profound. He’s not just talking about engaging the audience with scripted questions, or planting ringers in the crowd. He’s handing control over (or back) to the people. He had no idea what would be posted to the screens. Or if it would be relevant. Or interesting. Or even if anything would be posted at all.
Many of the posts were silly. Many were extremely silly. Many were questions, probing what Stephen was talking about. Many were providing additional or background information to support what was being said. But, even the silly ones were a valuable part of the presentation. Just the simple fact that a person could trivially post some text, even if only to add some comic relief, helps to show that letting go of control is not necessarily a bad, scary, or dangerous thing.
I’ve grabbed a snapshot of the backchannel to show what was going on. Each post was displayed alone on the big screen for 10 seconds before being replaced by the next.
But, even as great as the presentations were, as brave as the presenters, and as inspring as they were, my absolute favorite part of the conference is still the conversations that I was lucky enough to be a part of after school was let out for the day. Magical, fun stuff.
I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worth saying again here. My face is still sore from smiling so much.
TLt, and great conferences in general, are not really about presentations or content. They are about being together. And we all need to do more of that.
I was involved with two sessions at this year’s Faculty Technology Days conference on campus. The first one was a keynote panel on “Social Networking in the Academy” and the second was “Weblogs as Personal Repositories.”
Social Networking in the Academy
When we were planning the Social Networking panel, we realized that some of the faculty members might not be familiar with social networking, or with some of the aspects or implications of it, so we thought it would be a good idea to start the 2-hour panel session with a brief introduction to the topic so we were all on similar pages. Being the geek in the group, I volunteered to take that on. I wound up giving about a wiki-powered 25 minute intro to social networking (what it is, what it means, some samples, etc…).
This was followed by Paul showing some of the really cool stuff the library is doing with social networking (specifically, the Facebook groups for MacKimmie and Health Sciences libraries, and ad campaigns). Those librarians, I tell you. Always doing cool stuff to make their resources easily available to students and faculty…
Maria spoke about some of the issues she sees, specifically pertaining to compelling students to publish and engage in a highly commercialized and privacy-invasive environment. Maria also asked one of her grad students, Todd Andre, to join the panel, and it was great to hear some of the perspectives from the other side (as opposed to just making educated guesses).
After taking a few minutes for the participants to warm up, the session turned into a great discussion about social networking, covering a pretty broad range of topics. We talked about the geek stuff. We talked about intellectual property. Creepy Treehouse. Digital identity. Network as People. It was a really fun, interesting, and vibrant discussion. And we could have used another 2 hours because we had to wrap it up just as people were really getting into it.
Paul streamed the whole thing live via UStreamTV, and the video archive is still there.
Weblogs as Personal Repositories
It seems like every year, I get designated to “do a talk on blogging.” Usually, I try to focus on the reasons to do it - the network effects, contributing to the community, etc… This year, I decided to appeal to people’s sense of pragmatism. Blogging primarily as an outboard brain, for organizing and searching information that is important to you. And, secondarily, as a way to share information with others.
I think that was the right angle to take, but I’m not sure my implementation worked out very well. It’s still a pretty broad topic. I tried to do as much live demo as possible, showing concrete examples of how it works. I also created 2 blogs (one on WordPress.com and one on Blogger.com) to show what that looks like. The resources and links were all powered by a wiki page as well. Another form of outboard brain, but I used an institutional variation for this one.
I think the session went well. It wasn’t stellar, but I think people at the bare minimum got that blogging as an activity of documentation and organization can be an important way to manage the volume of information we have to deal with. If even one of them winds up starting a new blog, I’ll consider the session a success.
Well, finally back from 4C's and all that jazz (literally). I have to admit, I think this is probably my favorite experience at 4C's. New Orleans is an awesome place, and I'm sad that I didn't visit it more when I was actually living in Louisiana. Guess I know now what all the fuss was about.
I’m at the New Jersey Educational Computing Consortium Annual Conference today. I’ll be presenting on Creating Connections that Foster Global Collaboration in Your Classroom.
Mark Prensky is keynoting. I’ve never seen him live before, so I’m looking forward to seeing him live.
Call for Proposals: Georgia Conference on Information Literacy
Georgia Conference on Information Literacy
October 3 - 4, 2008
Coastal Georgia Center
Savannah, Georgia
Keynote Speaker: Carol Simpson
Proposal deadline: April 15, 2008
For complete conference details and access to the online submission form, please visit the website at:
http://ceps.georgiasouthern.edu/conted/infolit.html
Join us in Savannah for this annual conference jointly hosted by
Georgia Southern University's:
Zach S. Henderson Library
