Recently in LDSC Category

It's Day 1 of Learning Design Summer Camp! I wish I was in the thick of things today. Right about now, the campers are arriving, finding a seat, looking for available outlets (because that will affect the seat you choose, of course!) checking out their name tags, adding stickers, and getting acquainted. It's a wonderful thing, feeling the energy in the air, knowing just how engaged people will be in this event. It's a very full two days--and at the end, your head is about to explode with the great information, cool ideas, worthwhile directions and new contacts to add to your portfolio. While I'm not able to be there in person, I'm certainly there in spirit.

Happy camping from afar from robin2go on Vimeo.

Happy camping -- and MORE COWBELL!

While most people I know are gearing up for this year's Learning Design Summer Camp, I'm getting ready to depart Happy Valley and head to Chicagoland for the eduWEB Conference, being held at exactly the same time. I'm presenting with @NikkiMK on your favorite microblogging platform (and mine), Twitter, and how to use it to your advantage in higher education. While I'm excited about the opportunity to present, I'm already feeling that I'm missing out on the fun of LDSC. So this year, I'm going to participate from a distance by moving outside my comfort zone and do some vlogging with a Flip video, made possible by Cole and the ETS crew. Ready? Aaaand we're off!

Saturday was a beautiful day. Gorgeous sunshine and blue skies, no pressing schedule demanding my attention, just time spent with friends doing friend things. You know, the stuff that doesn't rock the world, but sometimes just rocks your world. I had made time to hang with my friends Audrey and Hannah, who have been patiently encouraging me to finish the first difficult knitting project I've taken on. We were downtown in Central Parklet for Knit in Public Day, under a pavilion at the picnic table, enjoying the greenery all around us and the cool breeze playing in the trees. For some reason it took me back to the art camps I worked every summer, helping smaller kids make their plastic lanyards and popsicle stick picture frames. In reflection, it wasn't much of a reach for my brain--doing crafts outdoors in the sunshine. I mean, duh. Talk about no brainer. But I had also been kicking around some sticker ideas for the Learning Design Summer Camp, and it struck me this was what I had loved about the idea of camp. We were doing things, but we were having fun. Fun discussing ideas and showing off our current works in progress. Then I found myself showing Hannah my sketches for my sticker submissions and we started talking about what we loved about camp when we were younger.

I was downloading LDSC "stuff" from my camera this weekend and stumbled across some community love which kind of choked me up. Chicken And Stars is a podcast that I do along with @Reginaldgolding and @Micala, and it is VERY grassroots. We talk about local community, things that are happening now, what people are talking about, and try to highlight someone so we can all get to know them better. It is a lot of fun to do, and Wednesday nights are C&S nights, complete with adult beverage in hand, as we sit down to create more madness and mayhem.What I really love is that the community is willingly coming to play with us and engage in this little experiment of ours.  What makes this relevant on my professional blog is that, at the end of LDSC, three of our listeners decided to create an homage to C&S and presented us—in front of EVERYONE at the summer camp—with a fan poster and a canned goods drive that was then donated in our name to the local food bank. Voila the poster:

Summer Camp has finally wrapped up, much to my disappointment.  It wound down about an hour ago, actually, but I find I don't want to stop the voices in my head. I think for most people, we try to do anything possible to extend the post-event high of a really great experience. For me, I have all these ideas still running around playing tag in my head, so I am avoiding going anywhere that is going to infringe on that. Ironically, as I take the back road home, I pass a large group of small children and their camp leaders (in bright green t-shirts almost exactly the same color as my own, no less!) as they head back to base camp after a day of fun at the park. Happy, excited faces, kids talking to one another and totally engaged in the moment. On an impulse I pull over to write this because the looks on the kids faces absolutely captures the spirit of their ETS Summer Camp counterparts. Over the last two days, I have watched the campers engage in discussion, dialogue, and community. I'd like to think that this was a snapshot of how they really felt about being a part of the conversation: happy excited faces, talking to one another and totally engaged in the moment. It's a really great thing to see.

The Learning Design Summer Camp is today. Starts in less than 10 hours, in fact. I am on my way to bed after an evening of checking and rechecking my slides and wikipages, but I had a couple of observations I wanted to touch upon, and get my thoughts posted before I fall headlong into the hustle and bustle of camp. I feel the gearing up of anticipation for this camp, and it's great watching some of these new additions to our twittersphere actually get excited about the event. I, too, am looking forward to another opportunity to meet some of these people I only know by their screen names.