UberNoggin

WOW! ReLIVE last week was an awesome time. So many incredible, smart, innovative people in one place. I was blown away. Not only was I impressed with everyone I was lucky enough to meet, the conference organizers did an amazing job putting it all together. I have pages and pages of notes so I’m going to try to cook them down into some bullet points and provide links to handy things in hopes of providing some goodies for those of you who coulnd’t attend. Pardon my bullets but it seems the easiest way…

Me, Mark (Roo) and Ted laughing at Relive

• Open University: I didn’t know much about the school before I was invited to help with the conference but the more I learn the more impressed I am. They have a quarter of a million students, spead out across the globe, learning at a distance. If anyone has a need to innovate it’s these folks and they seem to be getting it right. The campus in Milton Keynes is full of bright folks who think about distance ed all the time and are coming up with great ways to make it work better.
• Citing my work: For the first time ever my work was cited in a presentation that I actually got to attend Margaret Derrington gave a talk about teaching ESL in SL and cited my faceted classification to compare the features of Skype to SL. It was really great to know that my work is useful to someone.
• Brilliant Brits!: Some of my favorite people live in the UK so I don’t get to see them very often. Not only did I get to see them last week, I made some new friends and had a few FaceMeat (meeting someone face to face who you know online) experiences.
  • Paul Hollins: JISC CETIS This guy is my subversive role model. We did a talk together and completely scrapped our slides opting instead to just sit with the audience and have a conversation centered around a few points regarding educational affordances of virtual worlds. It was great!
  • Bill Thompson: Freelance writer and technology critic. I met Bill this summer in Brazil of all places and coulnd’t wait to see him again. He’s brilliant, succinct, and downright lovely to be around. If you’re interested in technology be sure to read his stuff.

• • Anna Peachey: Open University. Anna and her crew organized the conference. It was flawless and full of great sessions and tons of tea breaks. Plus she wore wings to introduce the keynote on the first day!

• • Annabeth Robinson: AKA Angrybeth. Her work in SL (The Port and otherplaces) is brilliant and I’m so happy I got to FaceMeat her!
  • Roo Reynolds: BBC social media smarty-pants. Roo is the face of BBC interactive stuff and not only is he cool, he’s innovative and smart. His closing keynote was great (and not just because he mentioned me lots LOL)
  • Tons of other people!!!!!! You know who you are, you incredibly awesome folks!!!
• Social Media at a conference: Barry Joseph from Global Kids talked at SLCC about the three audiences we face in today’s conferences: Here (the people in the current shared physical space), There, (the people in the shared synchronous media space) and Then (the people who will watch, read, and discuss the event at a later time through blogs, videos, tweets and other forms).  ReLIVE did a great job of making sure that all three audiences were addressed. The Twitters alone were well worth following.
• Capturing the experience: Roo attended as many sessions as he could, took notes and photographs and then gave a plenary that summarized the whole two days brilliantly. Looking back, it’s a tough thing to do to sum up an event and try to present it with its full richness and context. I’m still thinking about how to combine the tweets, videos, photos, slideshows etc into one form that I can share.

Meanwhile, lots of stuff is out there about the conference. If you know of a link I didn’t include please leave it in the comments.

- Photos on Flickr

- Videos: Day 1 Day 2

- Tweets

- Blogs: here, here, here

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