I’m at day two for an invited participation in an “Emerging Trends Workshop” for some 50 plus educators at San Diego State University. I was invited by the “father” of WebQuests Bernie Dodge, who emailed a few weeks ago, “Can CogDogBlog Come and Play in San Diego”? Bernie is one of the pioneers in Educational technology and the fact that he thinks I am any sort of expert generated a few night sweats. But hey, winging it is fun.
Actually we collaborated, along with another SDSU colleague Bob Hoffman, on Skype conference calls, a wiki, and built the content inside a Moodle. How’s that for a smorgasboard? The format is a mixture of mini presentations by us where we fly by complex topics at light speed and then spend more time in breakout sessions in the computer lab where participants get to try stuff hands on. Yesterday for example, I covered flickr and RSS in 25 minutes. Well, not exactly covered, but sprinted through it. We had each participant in the morning create a blogger site, so 50 new bloggers happened very quickly.
For each topic/session, Bernie had created an editable form for us to create “Tool Sheets“, more or less one pager “how-tos” that allowed me to create content the night before, and actually in between breaks. I like technology that supports my last minute creation process.
We keep letting them know we are hitting them with a ton of stuff and whiplash is likely. My stay here is two days, but the faculty participants will work all week on developing a summer technology project. The group is very enthusiastic and were very taken by the features and functions of flickr. In fact, one particpant, James Garza, shared what he posted in his new blog May I have Your Attention, Please his new love for flickr. He said he was so excited yesterday he went home and started uploading pictures til 2:00 AM and decided to buy a pro account.
That is good energy!
Gotta go, lunch session coming up.
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