The EduCon 2.0 conference this past January in Philadelphia also grew out of EduBloggerCon and was a good example of how educational meetings need to change. Most of the sessions were actually discussions among the participants (including students from the Science Leadership Academy, the host school) rather than formal presentations. And most of the topics for those session were determined through online exchanges during the months between inception and the event.

I’m looking forward to what will come from EduBloggerCon in San Antonio, not to mention from the “fringe” conference that Steve mentioned. NECC is certainly an example of a conference that needs changing.

I’m already putting together the network needed to make our strand a unique and powerful learning experience. For me, Educon set the standard!

Hope you’ll be able to contribute ideas, advice and perspective to make it as good as it can be!

Best, kj

We’ve been slow on the uptake as this has been a grass roots movement, but at this year’s conference our second round of Guerrilla Sessions produced 5 “unconference” opportunities for attendees to learn about fair use of digital media, podcasting, grant sources, and even provide a time for members of our social networking site to meet face to face.

I love the idea of using the wiki to organize sessions, as we’ve just been going with the low tech bulletin board at the conference route. However, the nice thing is that our organization provides us with a room and a projector for our Guerrilla Sessions so we can treat them for much like a regular conference session as far as presentations go.

If you can attend MACUL next year in Detroit, I highly recommend coming

Because I was in the Open Source Pavilion the whole time during NECC last year, I didn’t really get to be in the Bloggers Cafe, but I suspect that it was, largely, a “fringe” conference even without the wiki organizing. But it would be fun to re-emphasize this, and using NECC’s wiki I set up a page and schedule for events that could take place during NECC but “on the fringes.” For example: some serious speed demo times, and a series of 7 or 8-minute talks that either weren’t accepted formally at NECC or weren’t current when proposals were due. Here’s the link: http://plannecc2008.iste.wikispaces.net/Bloggers+Cafe.

I’ve also set up http://www.conference20.com to be a place where conference goers at any conference could self-organize unconferences, fringe conferences, chat rooms, twitter accounts, etc. I think David Thornburg said it best when he said that 25 years ago, going to an ed tech conference was “joy.” I think these conference ideas bring that joy again…

It was interesting how much sites like classroom 2.0 and twitter have nearly added to my personal network and added to the conference while I was there and in reflecting back.