Teach42

At PodcasterCon right now getting the general introduction. This doesn’t quite feel like a conference, it feels more like a big group of people who’ve decided to all hang out on the same day. First of all, I really love the name tags that he created. They’re all 5.25” or 3.5” floppy disks. Very cool way to recycle old computer materials.

Things are a little disorganized in one way which I can already see causing some problems. People have created sessions that they would like create. There aren’t really places for those sessions, people are just supposed to sort of find each other and start. While in theory, that’s fantastic. But with over 200 people split between two buildings, its going to be a challenge to find the groups that you want to talk with. For future Con’s, I would strongly suggest that they have a central ‘board’ where people can post a subject along with a location. That way if people have a burning desire to attend something specific, they at least have a general where and when so they can try to find it.

Ok, got that out of the way. We’re just taking care of other little details before we get the day started. Silly things like making sure everyone tags their post with PodcasterCon2006 so they can be aggregated together.

Heh, someone just pointed out that there’s no way to find each other, so they’re going to use a whiteboard in a specific hall. Good good enough methinks.

Someone asked Brian why he put this together and he mentioned that he’s hoping to encourage people to take media and broadcasting into their own hands. However, what it really makes me think about is the idea of people taking confernces into their own hands. I mean, it’s pretty darn cool that one person said, “Hey, let’s have an open conference about podcasting” and over 200 people said, “Sounds like a plan!”

John Pederson once suggested to me that we create our own ed-tech conference that takes into consideration all the little things that we’ve been discussing on our blogs. I sort of dismissed the idea way back when because it just seemed like an overwhelming task. But mabye I was a bit too hasty. How hard would it be? What do you really need? A place. That’s it. It’d be nice if you could have some food and such, but that isn’t actually necessary. WiFi would be incredibly cool, but once again even that is optional (well, mostly optional).

Right now Brian is reading off a list of the sessions that people have mentioned that they want to have. I just realized that there wasn’t really much of a discussion about what Open Space is or how an Open Space conference works. While that may not actually be necessary, without that basic knowledge it just feels disorganized. I’m in love with the format, but I’ve also got some experience with it.

I’m off to the first session! I’m going to try to post these throughout the day and then come back and put in the hyperlinks later. So if you’re reading this without any links, forgive me for now!