My post for tonight is Social Media and Conferences. It addresses the recent controversy regarding information sharing at a major conference for educational technology. Since drafting this post, several updates to the “controversial policy” have been posted on the NECC Ning. I invite you to follow them, as all of us in this field of educational technology will. Even as I write this, a new update has been posted from ISTE on the topic.

I am honored that this post has been selected by Colleen as a guest blogger on BuzzNetworker after I submitted my original post to my Twitter-colleague Kelly at Taxgirl.

This post is part of the b5media Business Channel Great Blog Off! Find out more about the Blog Off here: The Business Channel is supporting Accion International for the Great Blog Off. You can make a tax-deductible donation directly to Accion.

My post is directly linked here — in case you didn’t catch the link above!

Thanks for reading! Please comment!

Sadly, a trip to San Antonio just isn’t in the cards for me this June. One day I’ll make it to NECC, but it looks like it isn’t going to be in 2008.

I was feeling a little left out, with all the excited twittering about it — and I’m sure this will come to a maddening cacophony in the next two weeks — until I ran across this post by Steve Dembo a week or so ago.

This morning, I stopped by the NECC 2008 Ning, and was pretty excited to see that the groundwork is being laid for this to become a reality!

While I am amazed, I’m also thrilled to see that Open PD is developing a life of its own in our field.

I wonder how long it will be before this deeply impacts the factors considered as educational technology conferences are scheduled in the future. It seems ironic to attend an ed tech session and not be able to get a wireless signal, but such was the case in late April right here in the Chicago suburbs.

As recently as last year, a rather large event (one option of many offered by a big school district on an institute day) had to be moved to another convention center the DAY before the event because it was suddenly discovered that the original venue had no internet access outside of their own business office! (How do you stay in business?)

I wonder if these things cross the minds of people who own or manage reception halls and the like. Do they know how simple it is to provide wireless access in their public areas? Providing bandwidth that makes it possible to live stream multiple sessions may soon be a determining factor in which locations are considered for our field. Has anyone told them?