This past week I attended an international education convention. There were 63 keynote presentations and 370 sessions from 62 countries. How many different people attended for at least part of the week? 15,028! The total number of session hours (people attending X time in session) -- 8,372! I met a scientist who studies polar bears with a webcam showing two males frolicking in real time as he spoke! I attended sessions by prominent educators with global themes, leaders in their fields. I met some new people who share interests with me. And I did all of this without leaving my home!!!!! How? It was the first online conference of its kind -- The Global Education Conference -- and it is a glimpse into the future. All you needed to attend was a computer and access to the Internet. The platform for the conference was Elluminate, which allows individual attendees to participate in the sessions and, best of all, recorded all of them. So if you want to know what you missed, you can look up the recordings on the Global Ed Web site and sit in on some of the sessions. Staging this conference was an enormous undertaking, the brainchild of Steve Hargadon and Lucy Gray. They produced the conference with the help of over ninety partner organizations and 219 volunteer moderators. Amazingly, it was FREE!
My fledgling company, Ink Think Tank, participated in this conference. Our mission is to bring the joy of learning back to the classroom through the use of creative nonfiction. (Since the sessions were recorded and are available online I'm hyperlinking to them in the next sentences.) Two of my colleagues, Dorothy Hinshaw Patent and April Pulley Sayre, discussed how, in nature, "Everything Is Connected," and that nature is resilient after damage by humans. This was a nice follow-up to Steven Amstrup's earlier session describing the plight of the polar bears that are the "canary in the coal mine" alerting us to the perils of global warming. And if you're interested in what education needs for the future, I strongly recommend tuning into the presentation of Dr. Howie DiBlasi speaking on Education, Innovation and Creativity. [Note: to view these sessions you have to download Elluminate software, which runs on Java. If your cookies are blocked, it will ask you to allow it to be downloaded. I had no problem doing this repeatedly. Also, it takes a few minutes to load a session.] The conference Web site is up permanently, and if you click on the "Sessions" on the homepage you can see the threads and descriptions to find sessions that interest you. Then you can go to the Recordings page to listen. Not only will you hear some terrific people but you'll become familiar with the possibilities of Web 2.0 for professional development and for students.
At the beginning of each session the moderator put up a graphic of a map of the world. We could each put a dot on the map to show where we lived. It was extraordinary to watch flashing dots appear all over the world and to be able to hear people speak in real time as if they were in the room with you. As you might imagine, a lot of the sessions were on technology and on collaboration between people all over the globe. It was about possibilities that still have to develop. This kind of interactive global communication technology is a tool and we have yet to see what its impact will be. I make no predictions, but if history has taught us anything it's this: Advances in technology do not end war or poverty or ignorance by themselves, and they can also be used to the detriment of the human race and the planet. But they don't go away. Once the genie is out of the bottle, only those who participate have any influence on its use.
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