This Was Cool

Yesterday, I facilitated a session at the PodcasterCon in Chapel Hill, on educational applications of podcasting. For about ten minutes, I had the audience break into six groups and discuss six essential questions about podcasting in education. The questions had been contributed to the session’s wiki page prior to the session. Each group was formed around an attendee who had the technology with them to record the audio of the group discussion. They had iPods with iTalks, iRivers, handheld PCs, and the fellow at Trend Junkie, Greg Cangialosi, was using something that appeared totally professional.

As I walked around monitoring the various discussions, I took pictures with my digital camera. (I’ll upload many of them later). During one of my passes of Greg’s group, I pulled out my mobile phone and took a picture with it. As I walked away, Greg noticed me typing into my phone, and concluded that I was uploading the picture — perhaps to flickr. As soon as the discussion was over, he wrote a quick blog entry about the activity, happening to catch one of the moments that wireless was working in that room. He went to flickr and search for the podcastercon2006 tag, and found the picture that I had just taken. Then he included the picture in his blog assessment of the activity.

Now I can’t completely wrap my mind around all of the significance of this series of events, except to be amazed at the intellectual circle of connections that occurred, both above and beneath the realm of our human senses. When we can move our ideas and our experiences around and share them with people who have a logical need or interest, regardless of time and space, then what kind of teaching and learning might we engineer within the new information environment.

What do you think?

More on PodcasterCon later.