K12 Online Conference: It's off!

Tonight (Dhaka time) David Warlick's Pre-Conference Keynote was launched on the K12 Online Conference Blog. Entitled "Derailing Education: Taking sidetrips for learning", David begins by focusing on the changing face of information. He highlights his keynote with an accompanying wiki, and a video presentation. He also invites participants to collaborate on an 'Assignment' via the wiki:

"Your assignment is to think about the educational technologies that we have used in the past, and the applications you learn about and explore in this conference, and try to place them in what seems to you to be the proper positions on the long tail."

There is also the first online Fireside Chat coming up in about 5 hours with David using Elluminate.

The agenda for the entire two-week conference can also now be found on the Blog.

In his posting today David mentions the tyranny of locality and how we are not bound by this during the conference. We are free to watch, read, interact asynchronously and at times synchronously, consider, reflect and respond and partake when we please. This is great. I love it! However, let me inform you of the tyranny of living in a developing country on the other side of the world to the USA. This is a less discussed and documented concept in terms of online conference participation but I would like to highlight the main points:

• I could not access any more than the first 5 minutes of David's video tonight as the Internet connection is crawling along here in Dhaka
  
• The power went off at 9.25pm and came on again at 10.40pm (luckily I had one reading light and could at least get on with some of my marking...no Internet however at this time, slow or otherwise)
• The fireside chat is at 4am on Tuesday October 17, given that this is now 5 hours away I doubt that I will be up, even though I do start the average school day at 5.30am.

I do not meant to detract from David's keynote at all, and I look forward to catching up with it in full probably tomorrow when our Internet is back to 'normal' again. I congratulate the organisers and behind-the-scenes master minds of the conference, and in particular David Warlick for his creative and accessible keynote.

Technorati Tags: k12online06 k12online warlick