Today was spent in sessions from 9-6 with a break for lunch. Some really great stuff. One of the things I came away with is that my desire to move Voices to BuddyPress is right on. Every BuddyPress session I attended just reinforced my thoughts about how important BuddyPress is to building a blogging community on campus.
I also had a chance to meet Jim Groom, Andrea and Ron Rennick, Andy Peatling, Matt Mullenweg, and many others. Jim and I had a chance to talk over some yummy pizza and some drinks. Our views on WPMU, the direction of personal publishing, and education in general seem to be very close. We talked a little about the idea of setting up a multi-school WPMU, possibly with the help of a grant. Our thinking is that this might cut down maintenance and would give us an opportunity to connect students and faculty at the participating institutions in a way that cannot be done currently. This is kind of sketchy, but I really want to explore this some more with Jim.
I also had a thought while attending all of these presentations. I saw so many people with their laptops open and typing away. I’d say about 90% of some of the audiences had their laptops open. Of those 90% it seemed that about 10% were taking notes/tweeting notes. The rest seemed to be checking e-mail, surfing, etc. This struck me as a little odd. I took my laptop but all my notes were written on paper. I also thought it was interesting that Jason Alley of Lafayette was taking paper notes as well. I just wondered what people were getting out of surfing while sitting in a session. I think this is the fear that some of our faculty have when we mention laptop programs.
Sometimes I'm an Instructional Technologist and sometimes I'm a Mathematician, but I'm crazy all the time.
