#tltsymposium2008

Saturday's Symposium was a great learning experience.  Lessig's keynote address drew very interesting parallels to the past, with the one about Latin standing out for me.  When the masses did not speak the same language as the elite, each group became irrelevant to the other.  As educators, we need to recognize where the students are coming from and work with them rather than ignoring their backgrounds and forcing our material upon them.  I think I felt personally challenged because I felt like the giant Uncle Sam finger was pointing directly at me.  The sessions that I attended were very informative and taught me about new technologies that I am already telling others about (zotero).  The conference was designed to make people aware of what is already happening at Penn State.  Drawing speakers from the branch campuses highlighted the university-wide prevalence of emerging technologies.  Building in time for questions and leaving plenty of time to walk down the hallway facilitated face to face conversations that let me walk away with most of my questions answered.  The designation of a hashtag for the symposium allowed the community members to share their updates with each other.  This helped for all the tweets people were authoring throughout the day.  I had heard about a conference at which people tweeted and had a lot of activity, but I grossly underestimated the volume of tweets that would take place over the span of eight hours.  I felt that I got more out of sessions when I was able to read the realtime thoughts of others in the room.  The backchannel communication also permitted me to find out what was occurring in the other rooms and provided me with laughs on several occasions.  Many people made twitter contributions, but a lot of people did not - was there another backchannel or were they trying to avoid possibly being considered "rude"?  The tradeoff to audience members (micro)blogging during presentations is a lack of eye contact and uncertainty for presenters.  The community came together throughout the day.  People were having face-to-face conversations and technology facilitated conversations.  On some occasions I would speak to the person next to me, on others I would electronically send my thoughts through a tweet or a google doc.  I found myself reading updates from people I have never met and vice versa.  What mattered was that each person was at the symposium and communicating about the symposium.   The community seemed to be largely faculty, which makes sense because they are the ones using the technology at Penn State, but I think a larger student presence would be nice.  I think undergraduate education majors and minors should be encouraged to attend to provide an additional viewpoint for the benefit of all and to make them aware of new technologies for potential use in their future classrooms.  Thank you to those who put the symposium together and those who presented.  Thanks to Cole and Scott for having us attend.