I will be speaking at a state conference in April that will be held on the campus of a major university. The entire conference facility will have robust wireless access to the Internet, and the conference planners want to utilize the heck out of it.
A number of edublogerati have talked about how ed tech conferences should be evolving into the new highly connected environments, and the growing ubiquity of personal networked digital devices (handhelds, laptops, tablets).
What do you think? Where might this go? How might this conference utilize a ubiquitou network and promote it?
If you decide to blog about this, please tag it with “newcon”.
I am sorry, but I am not sure how to “tag” this comment. It is one of the many things (like permalinks) that I need to learn as I go… but there never seems to be enough time. (and I am on sabbatical!!)
I was at the TRLD conference and heard my favorite conference speaker (or maybe second favorite, David) Donald Leu. He began the presentation with some comments that I am going to use from now on. He said that if we had laptops online and got bored then we should definitely spend our time searching through some of the resources he was providing rather than listening. He encouraged everyone to make the best use of their time. He also gave us his IM handle and said that we should IM any good questions we had while he was talking and they would show up for everyone to see and he would deal with them. No one took him up on this, but it seems like a good way of creating a conversation with the audience rather than talking “at” them.
Janice
David,
I was having a similar thought at the K-12 session at MacWord a few weeks ago. I participated in the all-day seminars and was unable to connect wirelessly — at MacWorld! I would have loved to look up the links you and the other presenters mentioned as you spoke, posted my thoughts about the presentations directly to my blog, responded to pertinent insta-polls, etc.
I’ve been listening with interest to Steve Dembo’s descriptions of the emerging “Open Space” conference format. It seems like this would be a fantastic way to attend at least part of an educational conference, because as we all know, the best conversations, sharing and connections always happen in the hallways of the conference. What do Open Space conferences actually feel like?
Thanks,
Barbara – http://barblcohen.edublogs.org
I think there’s a lot more to do with the way conferences are given that deserves attention. Organising Communicate.06 I have been keen to make sure that, despite what my bosses keep saying, we have seminar leaders rather than speakers. I’ve banned PowerPoint and handouts in the hope that people will get online and, while in the one-to-one company of their colleagues, speak and discuss the issues.
Communicate.06 will also be podcast and supported for two months online in the forums and on the static site at http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/mfle
Oh, and there will be robust wireless.
And it’s a free conference. With lunch.