Feb
24
Written by:
Dan Maas
2/24/2009
On Saturday, Feb. 21, we convened the second annual CoLearning 2.0 unconference. The organizers, with whom I get to loosely associate and support, call it an unconference because they discard all the usual trappings of a conference: registration fees, complicated schedules, keynote speakers and so on. Instead, participants self-register and sponsoring districts contribute a nominal amount of money for some refreshments. We arranged for Adams State Credit (thanks Liz and Georgia) and invited people to suggest topics to discuss.
Our wireless was not ready at 8:30 AM. We had made an error in the access lists on the routers and had basically opened up LHS instead of HHS. But the top-notch network team was on-site (thanks Todd and Brian) and our networks manager came into the main office (thanks Mike) to resolve the issue before kickoff at 9:00 AM. The wifi worked fine the rest of the day. Over 220 people attended using about 6 rooms at Heritage High School plus the cafeteria. In reviewing the wiki yesterday in our leadership meeting, we saw that people were still updating the wiki on Sunday after the conference was over. The discussion groups in the morning were good, the kids were great in the whole group panel discussion and the round-tables were incredible with energy. A word of warning for next year's attendees... bring your A-game because this isn't a conference you can easily goof off in.
Unfortunately the remote video concept did not work as well as it did last year. I think last year's effort revolved around ustream.tv but this time we used Elluminate. The audio traffic back and forth may have been culprit causing echoes and garbled sound. But that's OK... this is Learning 2.0, not Conference 2.0. That is, the whole thing is expected to be a learning experience. It is far better to try out some technologies we are considering for classroom use and find out it doesn't work the way we want it to in this setting than in front of a class of students...
To Mike Porter, Karl Fisch, Bud Hunt, Ben Wilkoff... great job you guys! And to the Heritage HS staff of Ken Moritz, Jill Rikard, Steve Wolf and Becky Moody... you did an incredible job and made LPS proud! You will be a tough act to follow. During the event, several districts informed me that they wanted to host next year's event... They will have to talk to the Fantastic Four to see what's next.