Nexus

Here I am in sunny Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, accompanying my husband at his national optometric conference. Before me lies the gift of four days to do as I please! Of course I’m going to explore the city, shop, and walk the beautiful trails along the Saskatechewan River that runs through the city. I brought along my PDA so I can check e-mail, approve registrations on our ISS07 project and keep up with my Google Reader feeds. But since there is only so much shopping and walking you can do, (seriously), I thought I’d also “attend” a conference.

The Building Communities Conference is currently being held in Boston. Not an easy commute from Saskatechewan! No worry, I’m using my RSS aggregator (Google Reader) to bring the conference to me. This is the power of tagging! Bloggers who are attending the conference are tagging their posts with either blc07, blc 07, blc2007 or blc 2007. All I need to do is use a blog search engine to search for those tags. I like Google Blog Search because it integrates seemlessly with my Google Reader and displays nicely on my small PDA screen. Since I can read my Google Reader RSS feeds offline, once I’ve downloaded them to my PDA, I can browse through the blog posts about the conference from park benches as I stroll along this beautiful river. Now that’s the way to attend a conference!

I could put links here to all the things I’m learning, to share with anyone who might be reading this post. But you know what, I’m not going to. This is my learning - personal, and highly effective for me! From David Jakes’ invitation to be skyped into sessions, to Ewan McIntosh’s invitation to get a free front row view of the conference, complete with vidcasts and podcasts from his blog, I feel personally invited to pull in these feeds, digest them at my leisure, and make my own connections and meaning from the conference. This is professional learning that works for me:

• pulled in from the network of edubloggers I’ve been reading and interacting with
• accessible anywhere, at any time
• interactive, as I can post comments on the blogs where the writer has made points that resonate with me.

I encourage you to take charge of your own professional learning. Fire up the RSS reader of your choice and immerse yourself in the ideas and issues that matter to you.

Now, I’m off to explore the Saskatechewan River!

Technorati tags: blc07 blc 07 blc2007 blc 2007 professional learning

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 12:07 pm and is filed under conferences, connected learning, personal learning network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.