Recently in professional development Category

Downtime between holidays allows me to catch up on some of my RSS feeds, open tabs and twitter faves (hello, my name is Robin and I'm an incompetent multitasker...) I've stumbled across this beautiful Venn diagram and it's really hit home today.

Today we've spent the afternoon in a Transmedia Storytelling Workshop, a precursor to tomorrow's full day Media Commons Tailgate here at Penn State. Tasked with using a combination of tools to tell a story, our group (a librarian, an instructional designer, a disruptive technologist and a web designer) sat down to discuss possible story lines and tools. Originally we brainstormed about a smart phone app that would help users (visitors, new students, faculty, staff) navigate the campus and customs at Penn State. We thought of it, quite simply, as a survival app. You can see from our Google doc that we were really starting to roll with use cases. It became apparent, however, that we needed to focus on one specific use case in order to tell the story. One thing led to another (as things are wont to do) and suddenly we realized the survival story we needed to tell was clear: how to survive a zombie squirrel outbreak.

This year marked my first time at the EDUCAUSE national conference. In case you haven't experienced it, this conference is on an entirely new level for me. Almost 7,000 attendees milled the halls of the Anaheim Convention Center 12-15 October, and another thousand watching the streamed events online. From my perspective, it was seriously overwhelming.

My original title on this post was going to be 

I'm sitting in the last session of my Social Media track on Day One of HighEdWeb, listening to one of my favorite people talk about why we tweet, and it's bittersweet. Jeff (@jeffswain) is presenting on Why Do You Tweet? This has been a conversation he's been having with a lot of people, and I'm enjoying listening to him and watching the twitterstream reply to his question. It speaks to the love of my community, and why I adore this particular conference.

While sitting at my desk today, a co-worker stopped by for a quick update. He commented that I seemed to be very busy lately, and I explained I had a lot of conference preparation to do for October. He nodded and said,"Ahh. That explains why you haven't been blogging." 

Last year I attended HighEdWeb, a national conference for higher ed web professionals. I had been looking to expand my presentation repertoire, and was scheduled to present at the poster session. Others might have been a bit disconcerted at going off to a conference sight unseen and knowing practically no one, but not me. I've known Dan Frommelt and Mark Greenfield from their repeated contributions at the Penn State Web Conference, and was eager to see what their own conference had to offer. It did not disappoint. I was particularly drawn to the Social Media track, and was impressed by the depth and breadth of the program overall. 

I'm in Milwaukee for the beginning of the long anticipated high ed web conference (#heweb09). So far, we've had our fair share of flying by the seat of our pants mode -- arriving a day early without a room, or a plan, or a roommate with a plan (thank goodness that one was rectified). Wandered around the hotel a bit before finding the planning committee putting the finishing touches on swag bags (I walked in just as everything was finished--my timing is dead on) and getting ready to a walking tour of the conference rooms. Introductions were made easy for those with picture twitter avatars, and I felt like I had stepped into a room of friends I hadn't seen in a while.

Isn't it like that?