When I went to South By Southwest in 2006, it blew my mind. It completely changed the way I thought about my job and left me anxious to get home so that I could apply all the ideas I had come up with while I was in Austin.
I have not had that same experience with any conference I've been to that were specific to higher education. And I've been to a lot. Time after time, I got my hopes up but they were quickly squashed with presentation after presentation geared towards absolute beginners explaining what "this web 2.0" thing is or why the content on your site needs to be written for the web.
Don't get me wrong - there's a place for stuff like this. Goodness knows there are plenty of people in higher education who need an intro to this stuff including what it is and why it's important. I just have no desire to sit through it any longer. I'd rather be in my office actually doing stuff than zoning out in a hotel conference room while listening to the do's and don'ts of blogging for the 500th time or sitting through yet another vendor/consultant presentation that rarely amounts to little more than them pimping their product for an hour.
I want to have my mind blown again. I want to be able to confidently tell my employer that it will be well worth the price of airfare, hotel and registration. Given that higher education is usually about ten steps behind the eight ball on the web, I just can't make that claim of higher ed conferences any longer. So, where am I going to find that? If I only knew LOL. And please, if you know of something leave a comment! In the meantime, I'm going to focus primarily on improving my technical skillset and see where that gets me. Even if I don't get the new ideas that are going to blow my mind, at least I'll come away being able to implement the ideas once they rear their head :-)
My next trip: Boston for the Presenting Data and Information seminar given by Edward Tufte
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4 comments:
I totally agree. What is needed is a perhaps a small conference that takes a non-basic approach. I always tend to look for really geeky, technical sessions and they are few and far between.
Maybe we should start our own edu conference :)
Mike
highedwebtech.com
LOL I'm all for it but with one rule: Practitioners only! Not vendors allowed! :-) Kind of like a bar camp sort of thing where everyone teaches everyone else. Learning from each other would be so much better than sitting in a room and listening to people talk at you.
I've also been thinking the barcamp/podcamp approach might work. There seems to be a large enough community of higher ed professionals who are active online these days to give this thing some momentum if it got rolling.
I'd also imagine that securing a venue at someone's school wouldn't be that hard. Preferably in a city with good airline connections.
Do it in Boston and I'll be there in a heart beat ;-)
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