I was browsing through my aggregator yesterday, and found reference to this web site for for the web2.0 EXPO in San Franciscos, April 22-25. The site is cool, colorful, and decorated with a wide assortment of Web 2.0 company logos. But what really caught my eye was the little box that I’ve captured out and posted here in this blog. It says, “Stay Connected,” and it provides links to a number of ways that the conference is reaching out (tentacle mode) through it’s own social network (running on CrowdVine), a group in Facebook, a conference RSS feed, all bloggers posting from O’Reilly, a tag link for del.icio.us, and a link to sign up for an e-mailed newsletter.
I would love to see more education technology conferences adopt this sort of out-reach. Conferences have never been an integral part of the job for most classroom teachers — and with budget cuts already starting to snip their way across the fabric of our education institutions, fewer educators will likely be packing up and driving or flying to the city convention hotel for three days of shared learning and energy-generating friction.
It’s all the more reason why education conferences need to shine more, to radiate ideas rather than rattle them in a box. Here are some ideas:
- Consider a social network for your conference. Although I remain skeptical about social networks, social networking is essential, and a few conferences have made brilliant use of them.
- Give presenters a wiki page to spread out their session descriptions, post presentation commercials, and generate discussion through the commenting feature.
- Give exhibitors a wiki page to spread out their description and to add special offers, schedules of booth presentations, and codes for door prizes.
- Establish and CLEARLY advertise conference tags for bloggers and photographers.
- Either aggregate photos and blog entries, or set up a conference page on Hitchhikr and link to that. (I’m considering doing a major rebuild of Hitchhikr.)
- Generate a tag cloud that represents the conversation that is the conference.
- If you have a social network or are connecting to profiles in some other way, ask attendees (physical & virtual) what’s on their radar, and post that, perhaps as a tag cloud.
- Keep the conference web site going. Continue to maintain it. Post videos and audio podcasts of sessions. It’s good for your community, and good advertising for your conference.
Any other suggestions?
Great post! Your comment about budget cuts is right on. Currently, teachers in my district attend few if any conferences/professional development outside of our district. In my opinion, real growth is close to impossible if you don’t look outside your “box”.
Interesting post and right inline with some of the work we have being do at JISC (a UK Higher Ed Tech organisation)
For the recent JISC Conference in the UK (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2008/04/jiscconference08.aspx) we used a Crowdvine social network in advance and during the event, a Twitter backchannel based around #hashtags, livestreamed the keynotes using uStream, had people blogging and uploading photos to Flickr live and aggregated it all up using a tool called Onetag (http://www.onetag.org/ot/display/lister1/jisc08.asp) which we also displayed as a live ajax ‘slideshow’ on a large plasma screen in the exhibition hall..we also have audio and some extra video of pretty much all the sessions.
It went pretty well but there are lots of ways we will be able to improve things next time. I’m glad we made the effort to try it and would like to see more conferences doing it (if only to get more ideas for the next time we try it!)
I believe that it is important for educators to understand that there are “social” social networks and “professional” social networks. It is increasingly important for students to understand the difference and as we’ve seen privately and very clearly on some issues we’ve handled privately with students on the horizon project – http://horizonproject2008.ning.com — students do NOT know the difference until they are taught. They just don’t.
These networks need to move into our practice as teachers. I also believe that before having students in a public “educational” network like Horizon that it is vital to have them in a walled network FIRST. Experience has taught me that and I hope that educators will continue to listen to your innovative, thoughtful posts.
It is excellent for educational conferences that want to discuss the importance of using these tools to USE these tools themselves, like Lucy Gray did with the IL-TCE conference – she had a ning for planning the entire conference.
Excellent post. I believe you are right on here.
Hey David, glad you noticed the CrowdVine. We’re making the case that social networks are an essential conference feature because in-person networking is an essential part of the conference experience and right now social networks are a cheap and extremely effective boost to the networking experience.
Rather than introducing themselves randomly to people in the lunch line, CrowdVine attendees arrive with 10 or more contacts already made. At a conference Web 2.0 size we’re expecting 300 attendees who spent more than 2 hours on CrowdVine and many who look at over 800 pages (which is a _lot_ of hours). That’s not so much an indicator of our success but a one of the hunger that attendees have for networking.
In addressing the yet-another-social-network complaint we’ve found the two biggest hurdles are maintaining yet another profile and not understanding the purpose. On the maintenance front we try (and constantly improve) on our ability to import friends and pull in your blog/photo/twitter streams and then help you export your new contacts to a permanent home. And in conferences we’ve found a pretty clear purpose: help people meet face-to-face.
Hi David,
What a timely posting, especially since you and I are both going to have an opportunity to effect change in this very area for the 2008 NJELITE conference this July in Wildwood, NJ!
As you know, we are already planning via a conference wiki, and the Ning site is also in the works. With a little luck, and a lot of elbow grease, the NJELITE conference team (which includes many talented educators and administrators) will be able to bring professional social networking to Southern New Jersey in a very big way.
Vicki is right, educators and students need to be taught about social networks and their value (both professionally and personally). I’m hoping to have some fun with this in July, and that as a result, our attendees will see the light and begin their journey into social media for themselves and for their students!
See you in Wildwood!
-kj-
David,
Thanks for this post. I’m wondering if there will be any organized use of Twitter during the conference. Would love to monitor and possibly participate.
I’m taking a tangent here, but I loved the idea of schools having a button like that on their website.
What are entryways into the school virtually? How can you see what’s going on on campus academically? That started me thinking…