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Sunday, February 12, 2006

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).