K-12 Online Conference 2007
October 7th, 2007 by Diane
I am a passionate learner. Never am I more energized than when I am learning and contributing to the learning of others. Having said that, I rarely get as excited about organized professional development opportunities as I am about the K12 Online Conference set to start tomorrow, October 8, 2007!
Last year’s conference completely changed the way I look at PD. Never again will I sit through a one-off “sit and git” presentation.
For me the conference started off with a real eye-opener in David Warlick’s Keynote, Derailing Education: Taking Sidetrips for Learning. In his opening remarks Warlick stated:
You’ll spend some time paying attention to me and others, but the best part of this conference will be the time that you are reflecting on what you see, hear, and read, and then writing in your blogs and populating wikis, and then reading other people’s reflections, and reacting.
How true! I was enthralled by the video/podcast format that allowed me to pause, stop, restart and replay the keynote presentation as needed. I spent a remarkable day working through the one hour presentation as I engaged in my own learning sidetrips:
- I paused the podcast and explored the links to Blogger and Edublogs. I set up accounts at both and “played” for a bit.
- Back to the presentation…
- Paused again, this time to explore Bloglines. Found several interesting feeds there to which I subscribed. I wasn’t sure at that point whether or not I needed an RSS Reader; man, have I come a long way in a short year :-).
- Stopped, this time to get some work done…hate it when that happens…
- Back to the presentation, …paused at conference HitchHikr. Wow! I’d never seen this application before. Spent a long time exploring the related blog posts and cloud tags. I made connections to bloggers I’m still reading.
- And then there was the keynote wiki! At that point I was aware of Wikipedia, but I’d never seen a wiki used in any other context. I spent a long time there, exploring the wiki interface, following the links, but most importantly reading and reflecting on the comments left by other participants who were also taking their own sidetrips through Warlick’s presentation.
What a thrill! And that was just one keynote from a packed conference agenda!
This year’s conference promises to be just as exciting. Here’s the welcome message from the conference wiki:
The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2007 conference theme is Playing with Boundaries. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote by David Warlick the week of October 8, 2007. The following two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations.
I’m so looking forward to this year’s conference. The theme, “Playing with Boundaries” is very à propos given what we’ve all learned this past year about active participation through all of the back-channelling, sharing, blogging, tagging, and twittering activities in which we’ve been involved. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day here in Canada; so there’s no need to start the day with my nose to the grindstone. I can’t think of a better way to kick off the day than David Warlick’s keynote. If you can’t “make it” tomorrow, don’t worry…enjoy the presentation when it best suits your schedule. The conversation will continue long after the event; just join in when you’re ready! See you there!
Technorati tags: K12 Online Conference 2007, k12online07, k12online07pc, David Warlick, professional learning