Another Education Unconference. Don't miss it!

On Monday, July 25th Lisa Thumann and I are facilitating our 4th Edubloggercon Unconference. It will be held at the Park Plaza Hotel, thanks to the generosity of Alan November, from 9:00am to 5:00pm. Come all day or just for part of it. (If you want to help organize the day, please come by at 8:00).

If you haven't been to an unconference, you should really check it out. We design our own learning based on our own interests. It is some of the best professional development you can get, and it is completely free!

Our attending list is looking a bit sparse this year. If you know you are coming please add yourself to the list. We know we will have a great day, no matter the size of the group, but it helps to have an idea about who is coming.

Last, but not least, Lisa and I have decided to do 5 minute "ignite" presentations. We are hoping that 3 more people will join us in this endeavor. Ignite presentations are 5 minutes long, using 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds.  Check out some examples here. If you are interested in trying this out please contact Lisa (lisa dot thumann@gmail dot com) or me (lizbdavis @ gmail dot com) to reserve your spot and find out when your slides are due.

I look forward to seeing you on the 25th!

Edubloggercon East 2010

Commercial Influence at Edubloggercon East

We had a great day at Edubloggercon East just before the Building Learning Communities conference. Thanks again (and again) to the November Learning team for donating space and for all of their help with the event. You can find links to our sessions here.

We had about 50 participants which included some folks associated with a variety of vendors. At the end of the conference, I brought up the concern I have with keeping Edubloggercon free of commercial influences. Andy Pethan of Alight Learning sent me a very thoughtful and thought provoking email in response to my comments. I asked Andy's permission to reprint his email here and allow the community to respond. He graciously agreed to open up his comments to all of us. I look forward to reading your thoughts. I'm just back from vacation and am still gathering mine.

Liz,
My name is Andy Pethan, a student at Olin College and one of the people working on the software startup Alight Learning. As someone who is interested in K12 ed-tech both personally and professionally, I wanted to clarify your perspective on the commercial influence at events like EBC.

Near the end of the conference Tuesday, you mentioned your concern about the purity of the event. Though you did not ask anyone to stop coming, it seemed clear that there was some kind of line that was being pushed. At one extreme, there may be something like the Pearson influx that I heard had happened a year or two ago, representing the attempt of a company trying to turn the day into a sales pitch (this story is all hearsay for me, but if this is not what happened one could imagine something like this). At the other extreme would be asking anyone who can increase their revenues by learning from and contributing to the event to stop coming. Since these entrepreneurs, developers, consultants, and salespeople base their livelihood around making better products, positioning products more usefully, and training teachers and administrators on the use and large scale implementation of these products, it would seem silly to cut them off from the educators who care most about getting good products into schools with a useful and meaningful application. Assuming that either extreme is bad for the community, where does the line get drawn? As a software developer and eventually a salesman (when we have a product done enough to sell), what behavioral guidelines should I be considering?

I want to reiterate my interest in attending events like EBC and EduCon. From only two of these events, I personally have learned more about the real problems faced in introducing change to schools and the strong and weak points of the tools teachers are starting to use. Small insights at these events may lead our team down very different development paths, and in fact does (we started yet another redesign of a significant portion of our app yesterday, partially from problems recognized at EBCE). I can guarantee that our product will be much more useful to schools as a direct result of listening to and asking questions of all the different people that attend these events, and that someday our team will be able to make a significant impact on the challenges schools face. The perspective I want to hear from you, and eventually all the teachers/ed-tech specialists/admins/employees, is where are the lines between co-design, empathy, and beneficial marketing vs. product hawking and spam?

If you have time to give your thoughts, I am very interested in hearing them. If I attend future events like this, I want to be a fully contributing teacher and learner, not an unwanted pest or someone afraid to talk openly. This message was sent preemptively in the hopes that the issue would be more of a discussion right now instead of becoming a much larger problem in the future, and I think we both recognize the potentially bad path things are heading down if left unaddressed. Thanks for your time,

Andy Pethan

Alight Learning / Olin College

Ideas For EduBloggerCon East

After virtually attending and reading about Edubloggercon in San Antonio, I have some ideas for our upcoming Edubloggercon East (not just for bloggers) at the Newton Marriott on July 14th (join us if you can - it's free!). So far we have about 20 people coming, so it should be a much more intimate experience than EBC in San Antonio. If you can join us please click on the wiki link and add your name to the list of people attending.

• Under-plan, let's arrive with ideas for what we want to do with the day, but let's also let the day shape itself. We have a few "session" suggestions, but I think it is important for us to keep these "sessions" as conversational as possible. Check out Ewan McIntosh's blog post about what an Unconference should be. (He also suggests we serve beer!)
• Start with an ice breaker of some kind, something that gets us walking around and meeting each other. Something fun and also physical and interactive. Something that gets us started with a bang - before doing any planning.
• Think together about the structure of the day. What are the topics we are most interested in? Do we need facilitators for the discussions? How big or small should our groups be? I think it would be nice to do some things in large groups and some things in smaller groups.
• Brainstorm our burning questions and create a wiki that we can fill in with any answers that we come up with over the course of EBC-East and of BLC. This idea comes from David Warlick's blog post on EBC08 in San Antonio.
• Make sure we remember at the end of the day to debrief the experience. Let's save at least 45 minutes to reflect together on what worked about the day and what we would change(plus/delta).

What do you all think? What suggestions do you have? Were you at EBC08 in San Antonio? What was the best thing about it? What would you do differently next time? Please share your advice and ideas, whether you can attend or not!

EdubloggerCon East BLC July 14th 2008!!

Not just for Bloggers!
Click here to Learn More and Sign Up!

Edubloggercon at NECC 2007
(That is me in the striped shirt)

The Info:
W00t!! Alan November has generously offered us a few meeting rooms at the Newton Marriot on Monday, July 14th before his fabulous Building Learning Communities Conference!!!

So mark your calendars and re-arrange your schedules. I hope you will be able to attend this absolutely FREE, collaborative, "unconference" by the people for the people. This conference is open to all educators interested in talking about technology. Alan is donating rooms and free wifi, the rest is up to us.

Edubloggercon at NECC in 2007 was an amazing event. A bunch of educators got together and talked about ideas. People volunteered to lead discussions. There were no presentations. There were no slide shows. We met face to face and continued the conversations we had been having Online.

The Story:
Ever since that experience I have wanted to arrange something on the east coast around the time of BLC. During our recent New England Tweetup we were talking about organizing another meeting, but we needed a place to meet. I decided it couldn't hurt to ask - so I emailed Jim at November Learning. At first he said he didn't think they had space, but he would ask Alan. I was disappointed, but not too surprised. I started researching other venues.

Just when I thought all was lost, Alan emailed me with his cell phone number (how cool is that!). I called him and we talked about the idea. He said he could give us a few rooms on the Monday before the conference and the rest is history. I'm so excited! It just goes to show, it never hurts to ask! I hope we can pull this off...

Image citation: vvsquared. "vwv_005." 23 June 2007. Online image. Flickr. 27 March 2008.