Flexknowlogy

Unexpectedly, I began reading a lot of blogs this evening when I was supposed to be going home thanks to Darren Draper’s summative review highlighting criticisms of and ideas to improve Steve Hargadon’s trailblazing Edubloggercon 2008. Just as with Educause ELI 2008, I learned a lot about ed tech conferencing (or unconferencing) from a conference I didn’t even attend thanks to blogs and Twitter. I read these reviews greedily, as I am anxious to continue to morph the Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange into one of the most engaging ed tech conferences for presenters and participants.

So I’ve collected here a bunch of quotes that speak to the good and the bad of Edubloggercon in it’s first two years that I personally am going to think about as we begin planning TTIX 09. As I said, I wasn’t at Edugbloggercon so I can’t speak to the accuracy, yet I do think they communicate something about ed tech conferencing in general.

Content

Didn’t we talk about this stuff last year? And the year before? Not to mention in many places online in the interim?

Tim Stahmer

[Get] outside the echo chamber… I look at the title of the session above and think: Yeah…we know that.

Jeff Utecht

[This year’s conference was] more about tools and vendors than about the real work of getting our brains around how learning and networks and the very essence of how teaching and schools are being pushed by the shifts that are occurring.

Will Richardson

Structure

Start … with a set of questions, and then ask attendees … to collaborate in answering those questions from what they’ve learned from the conversations

David Warlick

Set up a space with two (or more) mini-presentation areas (not unlike the bloggers cafe actually), many “round tables” for people to retreat to for further conversation (this is key!), and plenty of power and wi-fi. … [Impromptu facilitators] sign up for [5-15 minute] time slots at the presentation areas

Mark Wagner

Engagement & Participation

…the breakout groups were too large which turned what should have been conversations into something more like panel discussions

Tim Stahmer

[In the informal area of the Blogger’s Cafe] multiple conversations could occur and overlap - and we were able to ‘play’ in a serendipitous fashion

Mark Wagner

[At Blogger’s Cafe] I would engage in a conversation to my right, over hear something on my left and turn and join that conversation.

Jeff Utecht

…the scanty fortunate [engaged in the impromptu ‘edupunk-esque’ sessions at Blogger’s Cafe] … represent less than 1% of the people that actually attended EduBloggerCon. Moreover, as others gradually attempted to join in on this cocktail party of learning, when the party became too large, those that were truly invited quickly dispersed…

Darren Draper

[Last year] the focus was on having conversations with people without the intrusion of [technologically mediated] methods of communication. … The back channel … got in the way.

Vinnie Vrotny

It felt more like Monday than Saturday…

Will Richardson

That last quote is my favorite–I think ed tech conferences should be more fun and relaxed than a Saturday, yet be more productive and enlightening than a Monday.

John K. read these quotes and mused, “Where do we take these ideas?” I’ll think that through myself over the next little while, and let any readers post their comments to assist.

Some recent blog posts reflecting on and analyzing the phenomenon of the backchannel (e.g. Chris Lott and Jennifer Jones) prompted me to write a consideration and proposal on the TTIX 2008 blog. My post there summarizes the question of backchanneling, and encourages conference participants (this includes anyone who participates, by the way, not just registered attendees) to evaluate the backchannel before, during, and after TTIX.

We’ve tried to build the idea of engagement, community, and persistence into TTIX 2008 through integration of Web 2.0 technology and conference structuring; backchanneling is just one piece of our effort to make TTIX a better conference, echoing the thoughts and ideas of folks such as Henrik Ahlen and Steve Hargadon. As success requires active participation by the community, I have to cross my fingers at this point and hope it “works”.

I’m always on the look-out for new conference ideas that can be implemented to make Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange (TTIX) more and more useful. While most of the “un-conference” ideas mentioned here require a large crowd (larger than we can expect at TTIX 2008) this article does illustrate the growing tedium with the conference-as-usual approach, and highlights key problems that TTIX can seek to avoid or inhibit in the future.

Steve Hargadon posted up reflections on his Classroom 2.0 workshops, and the ideas he has generated are great for generating new ways of showing, sharing, learning, and doing at the 2008 Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange.

A couple of ideas for TTIX 2008 specificially:

In addition to the option of Twitter, why not a simple web-based chat room for back channeling? It’s old-fashioned now, but most setups require no user name, and rooms are easily created. Skype is cool too, however.

To that end, we’ll have a presenter-editable web page for each presentation which will host a shoutbox, presentation materials, link to video archive, link to relevant blogs, etc!

We are going to try starting TTIX with a 45-minute pre-conference session for everyone on Twitter and blogging. Just a means of getting people in and familiar with these two powerful social software tools. We’re going to ask for volunteers to each guest review 1 session during the day on our TTIX blog, and so we’ll divvy out users/passes at that time.

More ideas coming soon. Again, I can’t thank Steve enough for his work on Classroom 2.0–even though I haven’t attended this, his passion to making it a better workshop (or an “un-conference”) is inspiring and motivating.

One of the things I’m most proud of in my professional life is our annual Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange, which is now nearing it’s 4th year. While we’ve held it as a pretty traditional (small) ed tech conference during the first three years, John Krutsch and I began TTIX in 2004 with two key objectives:

1. TTIX will always be free - no registration fee (and therefore no conference tote bag, low-capacity usb drive, pen, keychain, etc.)
2. TTIX will emphasize 2-part sessions: part 1 is information, part 2 is hands-on application

We’ve added a few other facets, like
presenters are encouraged to make their materials available under a Creative Commons license, videos of presentations should be available for download after the event,
organized social events can help folks make professional connections
And, this year, conference proposals can be rated by the public almost immediately after submission. Admittedly the 5-star rating system is overly simplistic, but we see this as a great way to (1) advertise the possible sessions, (2) give prospective presenters some preliminary feedback, and (3) give the community a chance to make their interests heard to the proposal review committee. Ultimately we hope to go to a fully community-driven conference proposal review system.

Today I was lucky enough to stumble upon Alan Levine (aka CogDog)’s reflections on the EDUCAUSE ELI conference, “On Conferencing”. In this he examined the big questions I always ask myself when I go to conferences: Why do we go? and, Is it worth it? Mr. Levine lays out several complaints and ideas for conferences in general, and this inspired me to think about how we might push TTIX to the next level of meaningfulness and value for our participants. Let me highlight and springboard off of some of Mr Levine’s thoughts (and some of my own) here with respect to TTIX:

1. Online session evaluations. Addition: with immediate results viewable to everyone. With kiosks at the back of the room. Or with “clickers” (as much as I hate ‘em)
2. Learning Circle. Like Cracker Barrels at DT&L in Madison, Wisconsin. I like these a lot, actually, because you get to meet people and talk about related interests, and share experiences. The way I see this working best is someone deemed as expert moderates at small tables, others attend. On cue we all switch tables. I love Mr. Levine’s note that at ELI they used wikis and Google Docs for note-taking; TTIX will have to have this set up in advance for it to work.
3. Post session archives in 24 hours (a/v). We post video archives, but haven’t been able to do it in 24 hours. We probably could if we cut the quality. Addition: make presenter information uploadable during the conference, so presenters can upload their latest slides or materials. On the presentation video and materials download page make participant commentary open, a la a blog. This could be attached to or on the same page as the conference evals for each session! Ooh, but then we couldn’t use a presentation sharing service like Slideshare…
4. Twitter used throughout. ELI had a Twitter account just for the conference, which I definitely want to follow suit with, and many of its participants used Twitter voraciously–I know, I read ‘em! What if we started the first day of TTIX with a Twitter primer/workshop for participants? How to use Twitter, is it good for professional development, is it good for education? I mean, if participants are glued to their laptops for half the conference any way, can’t we encourage them to participate through their laptops? (What other sandboxes can we set up for them?)
5. Do something with the backchannel. No real new ideas here. Chris Lott has suggested “some lamps or orbs which change color and/or intensity according to the back-channel assessment”. Maybe blog up a “best IRC or Twitter quote” per session?
6. Conference blogging. It’s really nice when participants blog up the sessions or even just the conference in general. What if TTIX had it’s own blog that the TTIX committee updated during the conference, or a wiki that everyone could edit on the fly to summarize sessions with. Or, if we aim for something more reflective as Mr. Levine suggests, what if we set up a blog and invited participants to volunteer to author a reflective blog post on one session that they attend? We could have someone in charge of providing those volunteers with an author account on our TTIX blog, and then give them a reward if they post before the conference officially ends.
7. A conference with just keynotes. Last year we ran 4, even 5 sessiosn at a time. Bad move. The sessions were too poorly attended, and we knew some of the sessions were not cream of the crop in the first place. We took notice for 2008 and are trying to limit ourselves to just 3 at a time. But John attended one conference last year that was only keynotes. He loved it. I personally like the variety of being able to choose. But we need to emphasize differentness next year. We need to continue to pushe for, focus on, and applaud the second-day sessions, which is our twist of lime on ed tech conferences. What if we ask 2-day presenters to create an assignment day 1?
8. More hands-on. This is my own suggestion/complaint. Perhaps instead of a conference entirely of keynotes we composed a conference entirely of mini-workshops. That’s the idea behind the 2-part session, after all, but taken to the extreme. Or maybe the regular sessions are all workshops framed in by keynotes (2 per day)? Or a keynote and a learning circle/cracker barrel?
9. More Something Else. At DT&L and many other conferences you have the choice of going to an info session, a panel session, a poster session, etc–all of which are running at the same time. Now I cling to the idea of variety (I’m a session-jumper, remember?), but what if we did 3 sessions at a time, but had an info session hour, a panel session hour, a poster session hour, a workshop hour, etc to force the variety into the day?

These ideas have revved me up. I’m convinced we need to “stir up the stew” as Mr. Levine puts it. The next question is: If TTIX were to implement any 2 of these, which two would you find most valuable? Which would make the conference-going experience more important, more memorable, more applicable to your professional life when you return home?