On the heels of 2 weeks of intense NMC online conference/second life events, I’ve been relaxing for a 4 day weekend in the Arizona high country. That’s why some of the blogging is backblogging.
The other thing that I did last week has have my “keynote” presentation for the K12 Online Conference. Perhaps not quite an “unconference”, I applaud the efforts of all planners, presenters, and participants for what might be considered an “alt-conference” in terms of the format. The conference place was a WordPress blog, with presentation rooms in various forms of streaming video, audio, screencasts, and what seems most interesting, more than a few wiki sites.
Just thinking about it how many of the teachers involved reached for a wikispaces site to post some content is of note.
When Darren asked me a few months ago to do a session, I tossed my disclaimer that I am a bit out of the K12 realm, and would be guessing wildly about where to pitch the focus. Some general observations on the feedback that people got the most of out the content parts on flickr. A number interacted, commented, and got excited about my silly bit of YouTube, but more so, a significant number of k12 teachers are completely blocked out of video-sharing services at their schools.
As my last piece of work Thursday, I got to be on an Elluminate live session “firesice” chat (archive available) with other presenters form week 1 of this conference. They had a fast moving hour of people tossing questions and ideas on the whiteboard, deftly moderated audio by Sheryl. We had people on audio from around the globe. When I had to logoff, they were talking of planned LAN parties, an impromptu later Skypecast call to continue sharing ideas. Impressive.
There is another week of presentations, capped by a 24 hour event called When Night Falls, where there will be skypecast session held once every 24 hours, hosted by a volunteer to have a conversation that potentially can move around the world.
And thid conference site will remains up, and thus a valuable resource for teachers everywhere, be they k12 or not. A momentous effort… again, this was all a grass roots effort to provide a free online conference opportunity to teachers everywhere
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