Sparklers of Northern Voices
It’s been one of those weeks full of sparkler conversations played out during catch up with long neglected others. As I sat down to fish out the followup links I promised people, it occurs to me that blogging about the sparks and saving the links here might bring small relivable joys. Before I light the match, I need to paint a backdrop that will hang against other things I have in mind to illuminate soon.
- The color of my restless clouded mind settled into dark sky at the Northern Voice bloggers conference in B.C. last month. Brilliant stars filled my gaze for three days, and I felt small and quiet in their presence. All the topics I think about, like community, social media, instructional technology, reflective practice, the emerging self, freeing and being visual, these bloggers live, breathe, and write about. Technologies I have wanted to play with like liveblogging, videopodcasting, and light painting were in use while they spoke. Packed rooms and lecture theaters glowed with laptop screens as everything that occurred was tapnoted tagged and transcribed. Participants are still twinkling and Flick’ring their reflections.
One of the people I needed to catch up with this week was Sam Gladstein, cutting edge e-learning director in the Edmonds School District, and one of my earliest mentors in online curriculum development. He taught me Blackboard, but has recently been exploring Web 2.0 and Open Source possibilities that would afford more classroom collaboration, storytelling, and student and teacher ownership of content. I told him I would send him links to the work of some of the people I met at the Northern Voice conference:
- Jim Groom, an instructional technologist who uses WordPress multi-user blogs with faculty and university students in Virginia.
- D’Arcy Norman on Eduglu, “a way to make sense of an individual’s distributed content in the context of a course.” and last but not least,
- CogDog Alan Levine who is far more imaginative than even his cool 50 Web 2.0 ways to tell a story which he presented for recording live on Ustream later.
Sparkler photo credit: pbouchard on Flickr