WordCamp Ed is a WordCamp focused entirely on educational uses WordPress — in schools and universities. The inaugural WordCamp Ed will be held at George Mason University on Saturday, November 22nd featuring a morning of pre-planned speakers, and a barcamp-style afternoon breaking into smaller discussions and sessions.

Oh I am envious of those in the area that can show up. I will be a bit too far away, even farther than Arizona. But I really like that Dave is doing this- I got to meet him only briefly at WordCamp in August in San Francisco — but he is doing some very cool stuff with ScholarPress- plugins for WordPress that are of use to educators.

I had a great time at WordCamp but felt it was really dominated by all the people trying to make a living selling WordPress development services (like 400 of them)- a WordCamp for Educators is an awesome idea. They are doing more unconference stuff than WordCamp main, and even better, registration fee is by donation:

There’s no mandatory registration fee for WordCamp Ed, but we’ll pass around a hat at the conference to help defray the cost of shirts and food.

I already see Cole Camplese and Patrick Murray-John are signed up, but where is the Reverend EduPunk?

Anyhow, I hope the WordCamp Ed concept takes off with more of them (look how many WordCamps there are, and all but San Francisco are locally organized). I wonder how many I could get to my cabin for WordCampEd Strawberry?

photo credit: lordog

Continuing the gastronomic theme for my WordCamp experience, here are a few quick things I took away from the experience (for complete coverage, see Andrew Mager’s live blogging)

• WordCamp’s t-shirt colors (brown this year) seem to follow directly the lead of Northern Voice ;-)
• Almost everyone I met was with some company, start-ups to large to individual consultants, people just creating themes, and were making a living selling services based on WordPress.
• Search Engine Optimization- I do buy the importance of making sure your stuff is well found, but the obsession with tweaking the game for the sole purpose of more rank is… well not my bowl of biscuits. If it your thing, check out Stephen O’Grady’s preso
• If you have a site based on LOLCATS, you have lots of good images for slides — see Ben Huh’s preso on Virality. He is one shrewd and funny guy and thinks I look like my icon. All of the I Can Has Cheezburger fleet is run on hosted WordPress (and he says, “we are simple only like 3 plugins!”. The complex submission process for GraphJam is one person in Vietnam processing the incoming submissions and emailing back to the main team. That’s one flat world.
• Microformats are quietly at work w/o us knowing it. Tantek Celik opened my awareness to hCard and a FireFox Addon that makes it simple to extract contact data from a web page (e.g. a google map search) and one click add that to your address book.
• Microformat stuff for WordPress http://microformats.org/wiki/hAvatar
• Concept of”syndicated” profiles is interesting. If site B uses flickr to authenticate me to create and account, it can auto populate my profile from flickr, it not only does that, but should I change my profile in flickr, such changes are propagated to Site B.
• Tantek also showed some prototype of profile sydnication tools — see DiSo http://code.google.com/p/diso/
• Cool tools from Lorelle
  • Google Reader preview (greasemonkey)
  • Absolute Comments plugin is a comment manager plugin that lets you instantly reply to comments, either from the original Manage Comments administration page, or from the email notification, without the hassle of visiting the post first.
  • Greasemonkey Script: Akismet Auntie Spam for WordPress greatly condenses view of Akimet to make it easier to comb through the crap
  • Woopro website tracking
• State of the Word (Matt) – more than 2.6 million self hosted (wordpress.org) blogs + 3.8 miliion on WordPress.com. Coming soon- interface improvements, in-place updates (one click built in). Who has the most active plugins (max was 70+ for someone in the back). There is someone out there who has 1200 wordpress plugins installed, more than 500 active
• WordPress has a “turbo” link in top right of Admin dashboard that downloads via GoogleGears bits of the site to make it run more quickly http://tinyurl.com/464lkb
• BuddyPress looks compelling – social networking plug and play built on WordPress. “”BuddyPress will transform a vanilla install of WordPressMU into a social networking platform” See presentation from WordCamp
• “Crazyhorse” user study of experimental WP interface “with lasers” tracking user eye movement is a great approach! WordPress 3.0.. with lasers! (I made that up)
• Its fun to have a WP Rapper around http://www.theseorapper.com/
• Kathy Sierra is an amazing presenter, very passionate about users “kicking ass” “getting above the suck threshold”, etc. Wish she would blog again.

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 and added links to my wiki — what I pitched as It’s All You Can WordPress at the EduBlog Diner available as an annotated flickr set.

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).

Sing along! “EduBlogging! Where It’s At (Got Two Plugins and a WordPress Blog…)”

If you are interested in the audio:
It’s All You Can WordPress at the EduBlog Diner [31:07 25.1 Mb MP3]

Some more WordCamp takeaways in part deux…

%NOCP%