Friday 5: A Tale of Two Conferences

[Lucy Gray]

With the advent of new communication technologies, it's now possible
for educators to participate in professional development by virtually
following conference events. While face to face interactions are still
important and clearly aren't going away, people can sort of be in
several places at once. This occurred last week as the Illinois
Computing Educators conference held its annual conference in St.
Charles, Illinois, and simultaneously, the National Association of
Independent Schools conference took place in Chicago. For some
educators, this presented a conundrum of which conference to attend,
particularly because the keynote presentations at each conference were
great draws. Fortunately, through the use of blogs, wikis, streaming
video and Twitter, people were able to get a flavor of each
conference. And, the best part is that records created by these tools
are still available for virtual and real attendees to revisit as they
try to absorb the plethora of information that came out of each
event.

I think this is the future of conferences and it is to the benefit of
organizations to plot their social media strategy. I personally am
more likely to attend a conference in person after getting a taste of
it online and, if people I've come across or admired via reading
tweets and blogs will be speaking at or attending an event. Social
media is not be an alternative to a conference; the use of such tools
helps disseminate important information and spotlights an
organization. In this open source, long-tailed world, this is the way
to go.

This week's Friday 5 is more like a Friday 8; take a look at some of
the material that came out of the ICE and NAIS conferences. Dig around
and you might find some useful links and food for thought!

1) ICE web site
ICE conference ning
http://myiltce.ning.com/

2) ICE conference wiki
http://iceconference.wiki.zoho.com/

Within this great wiki maintained by Scott Weidig and Luke Allen, you
can find streaming video archives of keynote sessions as well as
presenter handouts.

3) ICE conference twitterstream
http://tinyurl.com/icetwitter

4) NAIS Web Site
http://tinyurl.com/nais2009

5) NAIS bloggers
KaTrina Wentzel http://blogs.moundsparkacademy.org/nais2009/
Jonathan Martin http://21k12blog.net/
Michael Obel-Omia http://publiusrex.wordpress.com/

6) Sarah Hanawald's liveblogging of the NAIS conference
http://gdsmstech.blogspot.com/2009/02/nais-09-live-reports.html

Sarah used CoverItLive to liveblog for her colleagues back home.
.
7) NAIS twitterstream
http://tinyurl.com/naistwitter

8) Independent School Educators' Network
http://isenet.ning.com/

Another great online community in which educators can connect. A
great deal can be learned from the private school sector and vice
versa!

Crossposted at the Infinite Thinking Machine blog and High
Techpectations blog