Confererence Reflections

Wow, what an experience. My head is still spinning trying to digest my experience at Moosecamp and Northern Voice this weekend. I can't begin to describe what a great experience it was for me. Julie Leung's keynote is a experience that I expect to resonate for me for a while.

Julie's take on narrative, voice, and the "masks" we wear on the web has particular relevance, I think, to many of the discussions taking place regarding the relative merits of public vs. private websites and the implications, especially, for K-12 educators and students, given concerns regarding privacy and personal security.

Another session that I thought was great, albeit too short, was the session that Bruce Sharpe of Singular Productions did on Friday at Moosecamp. Bruce is an audio engineer who does post-production work as a volunteer with ITConversations. His Great Podcast Sound for Cheap was a great session, although I'd have loved to have more time.

Other sessions that also seemed way too short from Friday, and that bear mention are the Photocamp that Kris Klug ran and Part II of Photocamp (Digital Workflow) that Eric Soroos conducted.

Another "photocamp-related" session was the "one-minute movie" session led by Roland. During the session Roland used an application called Picture to Movie to make a movie out of pictures he's taken, and those that other session participants had taken and uploaded to Flickr with the tag "moosecampmovie", and an original soundtrack called Camp Walk by Derek Miller of penmachine.com -- the result (actually a minute and a half in length) is a styling movie that I think captures the spirit of the event.

I was taken by the fact that everyone I approached expressed a willingness to be a guest for one of our weekly brainstorming sessions at edtechtalk.

Yet another example of how open and inclusive everyone in this community seems to be. I'm not naive enough to think that it's all "sunshine and roses" but it's just as obvious that there's a lot of goodwill and espirit de corps from the organizers through to the participants of this year's Moose Camp and Northern Voice conferences.

Speaking of organizers, a special tip of the hat to all the organizers and volunteers who worked so hard to make the "unconference" a success. I really enjoyed myself and feel very fortuante to have been introduced to so many great individuals doing such great stuff. Apologies for the "stream of consciousness" style of this post, but I'm still working on digesting this experience.

I feel as though my trip to Vancouver has opened up a whole new world for me in terms of introducing me a number of really capable and creative individuals, and providing an opportunity to meet some of "the giants" in the world of blogging in general (and edublogging in particular).

Indeed, the only downside from the whole experience is that I picked a really lousy time to misplace the USB cable for my camera, so I'm not able to make my contribution (just right now) to the pictures being posted to Flickr. The good news here is that a service like Flickr allows me to access the thousands of pictures that others have posted with the tags Moosecamp (currently 1154 pics) and Northernvoice (currently 2390 pics).

Blogging in Education at Northern Voice

Here's a link to a post from today by D'Arcy Norman The Vancouver Education Blogging Sessions from earlier in the week. Regular readers will know that I was able to listen in on the conversation via Skype, and did manage to capture a little bit of the audio from the Social Software Salon @ UBC on Thursday, which I played during the preshow for this week's EdTechTalk Brainstorming Session 22A.

As D'Arcy says in his post from today, Brian and Jason recorded audio from the session and will be posting these recordings -- I look forward to hearing these and will link to them once they're posted.

Unfortunately I missed yesterday's Edublogger Hootenanny due to the fact that I was "in transit" from Victoria and didn't get over in time; however, I'm happy to report that this afternoon's Blogging in Education
session will include "wrap-up of the Moose Camp Edublogger Hootenanny by Alan Levine (who has just posted the audio and notes from Nancy White's session this morning), D'Arcy Norman and Scott Leslie!" as an added bonus. I'll work on getting more audio and pics from the balance of the day and be back with more when I have it.

northernvoice

Quick post from the Northern Voice conference during the first coffee break for the day and the first hour and bit has been fantastic.

NOTE: I still fon't have pictures to post. Looks like I'm going to have to break down and buy a new USB cable for my camera. In the meanwhile, you can see the photos from Moosecamp and Northern Voice at Flickr.

We began this morning with Starting with Fire: Why Stories Are Essential and How to Blog Effective Tales by Julie Leung. Julie gave a great presentation which involved slides of photos and the role of narrative in blogging.

The second session from this morning, Silfry on the Blogosphere featured an interview of Dave Silfry, founder and CEO of Technorati, by Tim Bray. It was great to hear what Dave had to say about the state of the blogosphere and how Technorati is different from search engines and the growth of blogging since he began Technorati in 2002. He also spoke about the potential threats and opportunities of blogosphere going forward. Very interesting stuff.

Following the morning coffee break I had the pleasure of listening to Nancy White entitled, Snow White and the Seven Competencies of Online Interaction. At Brian Lamb's prompting I managed to get some audio of Nancy's talk and hope to have some of it available, once I get a chance to see what I have in terms of "raw" audio.

I'll be back with edits to this post as the day progresses. A big shout out to the organizers and speakers -- northernvoice rocks!!! If you're even remotely interested in blogging, or need to see what all the fuss is about, you need to get yourself to next year's northernvoice conference.

Moosecamp

Well I was a little late getting here, but I managed to make my way from the island to attend Moosecamp at the UBC Robson Square campus in Vancouver.

I've attended a couple of sessions so far and am looking forward to learning more. I really like the "unconference" nature of the event.

The informal approach seems to benefit both presenters and attendees and allows for flexibility and self-selection in terms of sessions and "sidebars" on topics of interest. moosecamp was a lot of fun and I hope it's going to be an annual event.

Conferencing

While I'm not able to be in Vancouver today (I'm heading over on the first ferry from Victoria tomorrow morning and look forward to the Edublogger Hootenanny, although I'll likely be late. Living on Vancouver Island is pretty cool, notwithstanding the logistical challenges it presents when you need to get somewhere :-)

I'm really looking forward to "attending" the Social Software Salon @ UBC via Skype today.

Provided it's ok with those participating, I intend to make an audio recording of proceedings with the intent of playing some excerpts during tonight's EdTechTalk Brainstorm.

I'm also happy to report that Charles Campbell--an "artist in residence" for the City of Victoria--will be by to talk about the podcasting project he's putting together with a group of youth here in Victoria. Here's a link to a newspaper article about Charles' project in Victoria.

Please join us this evening (in North America, the show starts at 0200 hrs GMT Friday) for what I hope will be a very interesting and informative show.

Social Software Salon @ UBC

It's a long story, but I'm back in Victoria. I'll be making my way back to Vancouver on Friday for Moose Camp and Northern Voice on Saturday, but I hope to "take part from a distance" in a session that's just been announced.

Brian Lamb has posted in his blog about a session that's taking place tomorrow afternoon: the Social Software Salon @ UBC looks like it's going to be a great session and I've just sent Brian an email asking him if it's ok for me to join the "salon" via Skype.

I've also asked for permission to record proceedings in order to play some excerpts during tomorrow night's EdTechTalk Brainstorming Session.

I hope that I'll be able to make this work since I know that it will be an informative and entertaining session. One that I hope to be able to share with my audience for "Brainstorming Session 22A."

Beginning Coding for Drupal

Apologies for the brevity of my last post, it was composed on my cell phone. I'm back to report that the Beginning Coding for Drupal session was very informative. Aaron did a great job with the presentation. All the more given the fact that the room in which the session was held was nearly literally bursting at the seams from the numbers of those in his audience. All the chairs were taken early on, and many of us were sitting on the floor during his presentation.

It was very informative for me as someone who isn't much of a programmer to be able to see "under the hood" in terms of Drupal module development and to hear the questions that those in attendance had regarding Drupal development and how best to accomplish tasks in terms of design and implementation of Drupal, PHP and databases.

I'd hoped to include a picture of Aaron from today's session, but "technical difficulties" (I don't seem to have the USB cable for my camera with me) will preclude this, at least in the short term.

As always, watch this space for details.

OSCMS

Well I made it over after all for the conference and look fwd to a session today on Drupal basics. I will be back w/ more details after the session.

Blogging

It's been a week since I posted. I've been struggling to keep up with my various online spaces and it seems as though it's always this blog that suffers. Apologies to the regular readers who have taken the time to enquire about the lack of recent posts. I'm happy to report that it has been due to nothing more than being too busy to take the time to post to this forum.

My schedule also means that it looks as though I'm not going to be able to make it over to the "lower mainland" (i.e., Vancouver) for this week's Open CMS/ Drupal conference, which is too bad. I'm still holding out hope that I'll be able to attend Moose Camp / Northern Voice, but that's not for certain at this point either....

What makes this a special pain, is that I had hoped to be able to do this week's EdTechTalk Brainstorming webcast from Vancouver, but that's not going to happen; indeed, I'll be lucky to get over at all. As always, watch this space for details.