Tag Archives: Miguel Guhlin

The future of conferences

In the past few weeks I’ve participated in Microsoft Teams and Zoom meetings with Jeff Borden and Dean Shareski. Both of them did a great job, but I look forward to doing face-to-face conferences again. Dean recently wrote, ‘The Future of Professional Learning Part 1‘,

“I do wonder if we’ll be more intentional about what constitutes and justifies a great face to face experience and what can be highly effective as a virtual option?”

This got be thinking about where we go with conferences post-pandemic? In response to a tweet about his post, I said,  “I was tiring of regular conferences, now I miss them. I think they will evolve to be more engaging (why travel somewhere for a PowerPoint that could be on Zoom) and I also think we might see more (online) pre/post conference engagement and learning.”

To expand on this idea, I don’t see things like pre-presentations or assignments and tasks being given before a conference (read as ‘not homework’), but I do see opportunities for conversation, interaction with the presenter, and with other conference attendees. I see icebreakers and teasers.  I see feedback to the presenter about what the attendees want. I see presenters providing clear learning intentions and a framework for their talk. I see presenters providing a personal introduction so that instead of the first 5-10 minutes of a 1 hour presentation slot being “This is who I am”, the presentation starts with an activity, engaging people with other people who have already connected online. I see interactive presentations that rely on participants being involved and engaged with the material.

Think about it. Why spend hundreds of dollars in flights, hotels, and food, to go to a room and get a PowerPoint and ‘talking head’ that could easily have been delivered to you at home? When I went to ISTE, my favourite memories are the blogger’s cafe, and meeting friends to do podcasts with (Shelly Sanchez Terrell and Kathleen McClaskey), and the people I went to ISTE with from my district. When I went to SXSW EDU, the people I went with and the podcasts that I did are the only things I remember (David Jakes, Jeff Richardson, and after the conference Miguel Guhlin). The future of conferences will need to be much more about creating experiences and making connections and less about presentations… this was already happening, but now that we have created digital experiences that will compete, the pull of conferences needs to be about enriching the experience and making it worth the effort to travel.

DigiFoot12, Twitter, lurking and drinking from a fire hose.

Drinking-from-a-fire-hose
This was Week 2 – “Tweet Me” in Digifoot12. It was all about Twitter and Kim Gill @Gill_Ville was a great host!

I created the image above for my blog post: “Drinking from a fire hose”. In this post, I shared my personal Twitter user-experience timeline:

Twitter
Why would I want to tell people that I’m brushing my teeth? This is like facebook updates without Facebook -> But Claudia seems to think there is something to this -> Wow, these teachers are sharing great links -> I can’t miss a tweet, need to read them all -> I’m drinking from a fire hose, this is too much -> hey, I can narrow this by following a list in Tweetdeck -> and hey, I can follow a hashtag to focus this even more -> I can go away and when I come back, my network will still be there -> This is better than my RSS feed -> If I miss something in my RSS feed, and it is good, it will probably get back to me via twitter.

Which brings me to another graphic by Alan Levine @cogdog, check out his wiki page on the Twitter Life Cycle.
Alan-levine-twitter-cycle
I went through the cycle, and now I’m here: ???

I still share and try to help people on Twitter, but now I’m also a lurker/spammer/moocher, and I mean that in the most positive way!?!

Lurker – I keep Twitter on in the background, and when I do look at it I tend to follow links and do some quiet reading, without Tweeting. I’m not ‘on’ twitter nearly as much as I have been in the past. But I love that my network shares great links and resources, and that this network reduces the fire-hose-like flow of information that I get from many different ‘streams’.

Spammer – When I do go on twitter I power-share. I throw out a bunch of the links I’ve read, I retweet, and I have conversations with people. I’ve been told by a couple people, new to twitter, that I ‘spam’ them: Since they only have about 20-30 followers they can end up getting about 25-40 messages from me in a row before getting something from one of their other followers. (If I do this to you, feel free to unfollow me, I won’t be offended… just remember to come back when your network has grown!) J

Moocher – Google isn’t the only place to find information on the web. Often, my social network, and Twitter users in general, do a much better job than search engines! Example: I have a question about Moodle so I ask it on Twitter with the hashtag #Moodle and I get an answer I couldn’t find on Google.

BUT… I do still share a lot, comment a lot on blogs and help others on Twitter. One way that I help people on Twitter, especially educators new to Twitter, is that I will often DM them this link after they have started following me: Twitter EDU – Follow these steps and you will grow your twitter network much faster.

I deliberately ‘flipped’ the negative connotation to the terms above, and chose ‘spammer’ and ‘moocher’ as terms to go with ‘lurker’ because I think for many, lurking is a big part of what they do on Twitter, and that word tends to have a creepy/negative emotional connection for people. However, it is important to know that in Twitter, lurking is a natural thing, (everybody does it! J)

And now, a great quote by Craig Nansen @cnansen, which came to me via Miguel Guhlin @MGuhlin‘s post Gongs and Cymbals – Twitter Tinnitus.

I use a different approach to get teachers and administrators using Twitter. I have them explore Twitter before they get an account, searching for hashtags that I provide them. More info here –http://tinyurl.com/7shqn6m

More evidence that lurking is good!

When joining a social network like Twitter, it is easy to either:
a) Get frustrated with it before you build a network that will help you more than you could ever reciprocate; or,
b) Get fully turned on to Twitter and have it become a fire hose of information coming at you too fast and too furious to feel that you can handle it.
Somewhere between these two points there is the balance that I’ve found which has placed Twitter as the second best Pro-D I’ve ever done! Twitter is second only to blogging… but that’s a whole other story!

 

 

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ps. For those that are in the #Digifoot12 course, I’ve had a lot of feedback that suggests my Netvibes page helps to narrow the fire hose a little by putting all the links you’ll need in one spot. Hope it helps and let me know if you think of anything I should add to it.