Talking Ruby at education conferences?

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Aaron Sumner

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Mar 11, 2011, 6:02:10 AM3/11/11

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Hey everyone, I was wondering if anyone on EduRuby has experience talking about or promoting Ruby at education or ed tech conferences. I presented on web frameworks at a local ed tech conference a couple of years ago, with a focus on and demonstration of Rails. It was well-attended and got positive feedback, but I think overall it wasn't a great fit for that conference. The web developers there were interested but what I was talking about was maybe too advanced for them.

Have any of you tried something similar at an education-focused conference? Are there good conferences to consider for something that skews to the tech side of ed tech? Any thoughts or advice on how to introduce such a concept to a general audience?

Thanks,
Aaron

Karmen Blake

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Mar 12, 2011, 6:06:44 PM3/12/11

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Aaron,

Back when I presented Rails for the first time was at an EdTech conference (http://www.course.com/events/conference2006/2006pres/agile-webdev-ruby.cfm). Most folks were heavily into Microsoft technologies and some into PHP. It was well received but I got the impression that Rails was too untested at the time for people to adopt it. I spent a 1/3 of the session time with a presentation and then 2/3 of the time with a demo. The demo really wow'd the crowd because they had not seen a database driven app get developed so quickly before. It was a lot of fun.