It’s not often that I get to go to conferences as a delegate. With that said, since I have been back in Australia, my few PD experiences have been as a delegate. Prior to that I was very much an organiser of grassroots, for teachers by teachers, conferences including school-based professional learning, one day events for local schools with the Beijing Learning Summit (BLS) and over ten years with Learning2 (L2), three day events in international schools for international teachers. The key guiding principles of L2 which transcended each of these experiences are to create a conference experience that is new, fresh, and pushing the ideas of what a conference should be, and in doing so:
- create a conference experience that puts the participant first;
- understand that learning is a social act and make social a key part of the conference;
- create a conference that continues to change with the needs of participants;
- create a conference that is ever-changing, takes risks, and uses technologies appropriately in the learning process.
We consciously built in opportunities for like-minded educators to share and process their learning journey that included hour long interactive workshops, ‘unconference’ sessions where participants would self-direct their learning through ‘on the fly’ sessions, our Extended three hour sessions where collaboration was key along with networking opportunities with coordinated long lunches and evening events. Our goal for participants is to ensure everyone walked away with their PLN richer and wider and more deeply connected: a living organic connectivist experience that seamlessly flip-flopped between f2f and the virtual space allowing for networks to be cultivated, extended and pruned and flourish long after the f2f event.
While is says on the tin: Attended by between 10,000 – 15,000 people annually, EduTECH is the biggest networking opportunity for education professionals from across Australia from a connectivist viewpoint, EduTech did not live up to my expectations. But the blame falls entirely on me. I was not prepared and got lost in the volume of people, panels and presentations. Even the bravest extroverted teacher (which I usually am) would have struggled to forge meaningful connections with new acquaintances/peers – the synergistic glue was somewhat absent. Where were the online asynchronous meet ups? Who and where were others posting? Where was were the spaces for provocative questioning and participation in robust learning conversations? Did I misread the hashtags? Did I misalign my conference expectations? As an educator from out of town with limited influence in the edTech decision making process and the absence of a lucrative purchasing budget, I wasn’t on the lookout for new high volume purchases and big business conversations with the sponsors and major players. While my primary goal was to work out “what’s next for me – should I make the shift out of schools and into who knows?”, my secondary goal (most likely the goal of other delegates) was to seek out products, ideas, tools and emerging, evidenced-based, innovative, authentic, scalable pedagogical practices enhanced by technology (or not). And to a certain point, I managed to navigate my way through the two days to realise both goals. I came, I saw, I chatted with vendors, listened to short presentations, and managed to scrape the surface of some pedagogical discussions. For me, it could have been a somewhat uniquely lonely learning experience if I hadn’t teamed up with new acquaintances @franhughes and old friends including @julielindsay who generously shared ideas, resources, engaged in educational discourse and introduced me to professional colleagues. Of course, attending with colleagues as a team would have been more rewarding – using the divide and conquer model with frequent debriefings allowing for an organic collaborative, constructivist learning journey. So next time, I’ll be sure to find my tribe in advance, set flexible collaborative learning goals, map out an organic scavenger hunt and build in valuable hybrid debriefings: f2f/virtual and synchronous/asynchronous. At the very least, it will break me out of my own internal echo chamber and allow me to jump into a few others.
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