To say I had a great time this past weekend at WordCamp would be an understatement. Beyond the gathering of 400 other WP junkies, there was getting to meet all the Automatticians (and fascinating to learn they work as a completely decentralized organization; 30 some employees strung across the US, Canada, Bulgaria, Australia, Japan…).
And of course the wp-fanboy-plugged-in cherry on top was going to the speaker’s dinner the night before and being seated across from Matt Mullenweg, who remembered sneaking in on my session at Northern Voice. Matt described that they only plan the San Francisco WordCamp, and the other 15 or so that go on around the blog are locally organized– he says he likes to show up un-announced to check out what people are doing who use his company’s wares.
Yes, it was through a connection via James Farmer that I got invited to do a presentation on Education and WordPress (somehow in the program that was handed out 20 minutes before show time) it was labeled as “WordPress and the Future of Education” quite a larger scope than I had planned. But hey, it is “camp” and we can diverge.
My stomach tied a few knots when the day before I saw the list of other presenters and found myself a minnow among some big fish. And then Matt said more than 400 were registered! And… he gave me an opening slot. Wow. Woah, Neo, Wow.
The 30 minute slot I had was devoted more to a quick smorgasbord sampling of the varied ways educators were using WordPress now, collected from people who tagged stuff (delicious.com died, these are in pinboard) and added links to my wiki — what I pitched as It’s All You Can WordPress at the EduBlog Diner.
Matt Mullenweg opens WordCamp with my title slide in background!
I do have an audio recording below, and hoping I got in all the shoutouts that were deserved. Here is where I gauged the connection of my topic with the audience by asking to let me know how many of them went to school 😉
and then how many of them used the web in school…
And then I went into full spring mode. I found later there was a guy, Andew Mager, in the front row who was live blogging everything for ZDnet (and got a super glamorous photo of me. Not). I saw his tweet:
And of course, what I showed is a gross undersampling of all the possible examples out there. So below is an embedded slideshow of my screens I ran through (again, the entire thing is an annotated flickr set).
I was this close from running the presentation in PicLens from this flickr set, but had a last minute worry about the volume of net activity going on a blog conference, so I paced through the same set in iPhoto. I had a second set as an iPhoto slideshow with music, which was rocking out before the show started (this embed seems to be not behaving, if not try watching it on slideflickr) (flash killed that site).
Imagine singing along! “EduBlogging! Where It’s At (Got Two Plugins and a WordPress Blog…)”
If you are interested in the audio:
Some more WordCamp takeaways in part deux…
You did an amazing job showing off all the fantastic sites around the world that use WordPress to share their love of education. It always fascinates me how educators push WordPress to the limits to integrate it into their lives, work, and classroom, reaching beyond the classroom to the world. I love it.
Thanks for the great presentation and I look forward to MORE!