21st Century Learning: K12 Online Conference AfterGlow

The K12 Online Conference has now officially come to a close. I am feeling an odd mix of relief combined with sadness, with a touch of satisfaction thrown in- at how well it all seemed to go. Not bad for our first year and personally, as one of the conference conveners, I have learned so much.

For those of you that didn’t know, the K12 Online Conference was a global professional development opportunity for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools for instruction and professional practice! This year’s conference was held over two weeks, Oct. 23-27 and Oct. 30- Nov. 3 and included a preconference keynote. The conference theme was “Unleashing the Potential.” You can review a Press Release of the event here.

The conference agenda now includes links to all 41 presentations of the conference, and both the podcast feed for week1 and the podcast feed for week2 are now complete with all the shared presentation links. Feel free to subscribe to those links via ITunes. If you have a video iPod to play the iPod-compatible video files on, you will be able to download all those presentations with just a few mouseclicks and view at your convenience or if you do not have an IPod simply store them on your computer for relatively easy offline viewing.

As you watch the presentations in the future months, please post your comments and reflections so they pingback to the original posts on the K-12 Online Conference 2006 blog. We are very grateful to the the College of William and Mary’s School of Education for agreeing to host these presentation files online in the coming year so these resources will continue to be available for others. It demonstrates their commitment to educators being able to use Web 2.0 tools in their instruction.

I would also like to thank Elluminate for the use of their product in hosting the fireside chats during the conference.

And I would like to thank Jeff and Dave over at Worldbridges for their promotion of the conferences through EdTech Talk. EdTechTalk#67 ( listen to podcast here) A Discussion about the K12 Online Conference with Darren Kuropatwa and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach

October 29, 2006

EdTechBrainStorm (listen to Podcast here) October 19, 2006 Darren Kuropatwa stops by to discuss the upcoming K12 Online Conference

However, the real accolade needs to go to the keynoters, presenters, and moderators for the selfless time they put into making this conference what it became. I have made so many new friends and found potential collaboration partners from around the world! So many in the blogosphere were just names to me before and now they are real people with many like-minded ideals to mine.

I said this during several of the Skypecasts I attended during the When Night Falls event, but it merits repeating... I think the most surprising thing for me was the number of people who visited the K12 Online Conference in the three weeks the site was live- over 40,000 people from around the world. Take a look at the cluster map below. Take note that each larger circle represents 1000 people. It is mind sobering and for me and makes the world seem very flat and connected.

I remember once as a preservice teacher taking a geography course. We were looking at the globe and then at flat maps. I had never studied geography as a child and so it was really the first time I had ever taken such a close look. While looking at the globe I was amazed at how far away all the continents were from each other. Thinking wow-- China is clear around the world. Then in amazement I remember looking at the flat map and saying to my instructor that when we look at the world as God does-- from an aerial view-- we are all quite connected. None of the continents are very far from each other at all. It was a profound moment for me and really has guided my interest in other cultures and people throughout my life.

The K12 Online Conference has reignited in me that feeling from that day. We really are quite connected and not very far away from each other at all.