zaterdag, oktober 06, 2007
Straight line to Learning 2007 conference
In about 2 weeks time Elliott Masie's Learning 2007 conference starts in Orlando, and I'll be one of the participants. The preparation for the event is going on at full speed, and I must say I'm impressed so far with the building up to the event.
One of my colleagues describes conferences as 'the cult of the wicker man'. He means that on typical conferences, people gather from all around, have a couple of days of intense information sharing, networking and festivities, and then burn it (the wicker man) all down to the ground in a big closing ceremony. Nothing but memories remain and the whole thing starts over the next year.
Learning 2007 does its best to break away from that: there is for example a learning wiki where all sessions have their page, is free for the world at large to view and remains open after the conference. As part of the pre-conference building up there are various mails, YouTube video's, an RSS feed for updates and the social network site I blogged about before. I had a quick look at it again and I found in my circle of 500 closest people not one other Belgian, but a few Dutch people, some people interested in quiz, ... I hope to meet other people that have experimented with 2.0 stuff in learning so I can take some of that into my very own 'social quiz/learning' site about2findout.com when it opens in December.
It remains to be seen how much of this wicker man will remain in November, but the signs look good. As conferences are an annual thing anyway with a lot of the same attendees, why don't they all encourage a more continuous conversation and networking that results in a yearly cumulative point?
Oh, and I enrolled in the Sunday pre session on Mobile Learning for two reasons: it is interesting, and it just became free (thanks!). I guess I'll see Disney backstage another time.
One of my colleagues describes conferences as 'the cult of the wicker man'. He means that on typical conferences, people gather from all around, have a couple of days of intense information sharing, networking and festivities, and then burn it (the wicker man) all down to the ground in a big closing ceremony. Nothing but memories remain and the whole thing starts over the next year.
Learning 2007 does its best to break away from that: there is for example a learning wiki where all sessions have their page, is free for the world at large to view and remains open after the conference. As part of the pre-conference building up there are various mails, YouTube video's, an RSS feed for updates and the social network site I blogged about before. I had a quick look at it again and I found in my circle of 500 closest people not one other Belgian, but a few Dutch people, some people interested in quiz, ... I hope to meet other people that have experimented with 2.0 stuff in learning so I can take some of that into my very own 'social quiz/learning' site about2findout.com when it opens in December.
It remains to be seen how much of this wicker man will remain in November, but the signs look good. As conferences are an annual thing anyway with a lot of the same attendees, why don't they all encourage a more continuous conversation and networking that results in a yearly cumulative point?
Oh, and I enrolled in the Sunday pre session on Mobile Learning for two reasons: it is interesting, and it just became free (thanks!). I guess I'll see Disney backstage another time.
Labels: learning 2007, masie
