Guess which camp I'm in

Old school way to attend a conference: Go to a new place and meet a bunch of new and stimulating people. Maybe you are a stimulating person yourself. Get exposed to a bunch of new and stimulating ideas. Go home and try to share what you learned and stay in touch with the people you met. Assimilate back into daily life, weeks later remember a really cool resource you found at the conference but can't find it. Try to apply what you learned but struggle along by yourself.

New school way to attend a conference: Go ahead and be stimulating and new, that part didn't change. Build a shared resource with other conference attendees, share pictures, links and heck even tweets. If you really get carried away you could even live blog the event. *Phew* tired yet? Personally I'd still like to see a Facebook or LinkedIn group related to the event so I can network with attendees after the event. That would be pure sweetness.

Oh yeah, and after the conference don't forget to get feedback using an online survey tool.

Flat Classroom Project

After talking with Jake the other day about how his grad class used wikis to connect with another class from Spain I was starting to think about how in the world to make those initial connections.

That seems to be the really tricky part - finding a class and a teacher you can work with to the right degree. It would be rotten to get all fired up with your students only to partner with a school that only wants to connect online once. After you've found a school and a project to do together then the wiki is just a convenient place to hang out. In other words, the wiki isn't the end - it's the means.

Enter the Flat Classroom Project. This looks like a very interesting global project to connect classrooms around problems and opportunities as discussed in Friedman's The World is Flat. "Oh yeah," I said to myself, "I read that book - it seemed like a really good book to base a project on."

Looks like these folks have gone and done it - and they are interested in finding other schools to join them.

Social productivity is going to need some time to catch on

Beth Kanter has a great post over on her blog about personal productivity versus social productivity. I definitely feel the crunch some times between staying in touch and getting work done. That's why Google Reader changed the way I read the web. I also liked her idea of screen-capping her desktop so I copied it for this post!

But I do agree that social productivity is a real phenomenon. I've felt it's power not just with wikis but also with the effectiveness of maintaining a group of contacts who share ideas and goals. I posted previously on doing this with Skype.

I think though that this concept is going to take some time to catch on in schools. Generally we frown on Facebook and chatting as frivolous at best. I'm curious about how a truly social networked school or class would function differently from a non-networked one.

Maybe I'll have to try that out with the class I'm teaching in the fall?

Is MySpace just a fad?

Matt found this awesome article on Myspace and similar technologies.

Check it out!