One stunningly useful aspect of the conference was the free wi-fi Internet access. It made a huge difference. For example, I don't know how many times I've written a web address down on a bit of paper only to find that I couldn't make head nor tail of it when I tried to go to the site at a later date. "Is that a wibble dot com or a wobble dot com I've written down?" At this conference, I could go directly to the website and bookmark it, or blog about it. Great! Also, being able to blog the conference as it happened was good. I think it kept me sharp, kept me focused.
There were a number of active bloggers at the event so that you could get a variety of interpretations of the same session or find out about one you missed. ...And wasn't it interesting that one keynote speaker created a blog post about the other keynote? The explosion of posts seemed to catch peoples attention. For example David Warlick picked up on it with a post on Hitch Hiking and Learning. As he says:
"I'’ve breathed in the exhaust of the eLIVE event, and I've learned."I'm not sure about the "exhaust" bit, but I think I know what he means. :-)
However, the very best bit of the conference was getting to meet and talk to a whole bunch of fantastic people. For example, I got to talk to Will Richardson - in fact he came with us on the Scotedublog Meetup which was brilliant. I've included a photo here that Ewan took of Will saying good stuff and me trying to keep up! I am sorry though that I didn't get a chance to talk to Alan November. Ewan said that he had read my post of his keynote and that I should have said hello, but he'd gone back to the States before I had a chance... maybe another time.
It was also good to spend time with Ewan and John. Back at SETT last year, as far as we knew, we were the only Scottish edubloggers there (although I'm sure there were others). It will be interesting to see how many there are by this year's SETT. :-) ...At least 118 more if Andrew has his way! I took my laptop to SETT last year, but didn't see anybody else using one (other than presenters showing their presentations!). I suspect things might be different this year... and I hope that they have free wi-fi access to make it easy for people to share what they're learning.
And aprt from everything else, John told me what changed him from being suspicious of technology in the classroom to the uber-geek he is today! No offence intended John. :-)
This has been a bit of a self-indulgent ramble, so I'll try to redeem myself with a couple of questions here at the end. :-)
- How useful did people find the posts from the conference?
- Did anyone else feel, as David Warlick did, that they learned from all the different people making posts?
Technorati Tags: eLive2006, blogging, Alan November, Will Richards, David Warlick, John Johnston, Ewan McIntosh, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog
A great post David. Dave Sifry, the CEO of Technorati, once said that the blogosphere is "..the exhaust of the human attention streams."
ReplyDeleteNo negative connotations here.
Later!
-- dave --
Cetrainly the two days of the conference left me exhausted! :-)
ReplyDelete