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sym·po·si·um   (sĭm-pō'zē-əm)

1. A meeting or conference for discussion of a topic, especially one in which the participants form an audience and make presentations.
2. A collection of writings on a particular topic, as in a magazine.
3. A convivial meeting for drinking, music, and intellectual discussion among the ancient Greeks.

Saturday was the long awaited arrival of this year's TLT Symposium. As usual, the day was full, it was engaging, it was a bit overwhelming, and at the end of the event, there was more to take away than I could really effectively comment on without additional cogitation (you know, thought, decompression, discussion, and... stuff).

Jon Stewart had a segment on twittering last night that was rolling on the floor funny. At least, it was funny to me. But it also provoked some thought into our love affair with Twitter going mainstream. If you didn't catch it, go ahead. I'll wait. In fact, I'll see you after the fold.

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:

Cole Camplese threw the blogging gauntlet down today. In a general post on his blog, he proposed the idea of writing a blog post each day for the month of August. After a number of favorable responses, Cole fleshed out the guidelines in his post New Rules, One Post a Day and challenged his readers to join him in this experiment. I find this both intriguing and terrifying. Obviously, I don't post every day; instead, I tend to blog when the feeling moves me (as she says in Pretty Woman, "I say who, I say where, I say how much..."). So to make the commitment that I will definitely create a post each day that isn't just phoned in is a big commitment for me. What will I talk about?

Honestly, I am going to rely on my community for much of my input. I am going to make observations and engage others who have also decided to join this experiment to interact with their posts, their thoughts, their reflections. This is going to be more than I normally do; a lot of times, I simply lurk on a blog but it really doesn't allow me to engage in the discussion, now, does it? Bad form, Robin! Perhaps this is what I need to better understand and get to know my community. What they are interested in. What their background is. What motivates them. What are they passionate about. Right now I don't know where this is going.

But I bet I find out.

As we continue to plan the Learning Design Summer Camp, my twitter feed is once again morphing into a community of anticipation. We did this in the TLT Symposium, and it was a good feeling to be a part of something in which everyone looks forward to participating. In community discussions on the wiki about the look and feel of the summer camp logo, I sat one evening and watched the artwork change, and expand, and form new ideas as people added their thoughts and input, whether it was comments in the wiki, new logos that had been bastardized from earlier versions to better illustrate a point, or even the discussion that carried through twitter. I can't think of another time where I've seen the community drive the discussion and truly help form an event. Sure, a good planning committee will be productive in their interactions, but this is something completely different. This is an open invitation to a group to help plan an event they can then participate in. I watch the dynamics and I'm almost in awe with the way it just unfolds before my eyes.

I have so much I want to say about things I got to explore at Web 2008 Conference earlier this week. I have to say that, to me, this had a much different feel than previous Web Conferences. I felt there was a lot more to offer this year under a greater variety of topics. I think Birds of a Feather and Lightning Talks were even more successful than before and, IMHO, I think the conference is going in the right direction. Agree? Disagree? In either event, make sure you give them your feedback in the evaluations for both the conference and the next day tutorials. Your opinions are very important to future directions and risks that the conference will take. In the meantime, there will be more posts about other things (believe me; I know I've got one or two about Steve Krug alone) over the next few days as I sort them out of my brain. Today, however, I want to share an idea that stems from one of the tutorials I had on Tuesday.

Tuesday morning was Mark Greenfield's tutorial on The Long Tail of Social Networks. It was inspiring, and I keep finding myself resonating with what our social networks have to offer that really isn't captured effectively elsewhere. (I had to thank Mark later, because his book list alone is gonna run me about 200 clams and a couple of months to read it all. The Long Tail, Groundswell, Millennials Go to College and Here Comes Everybody, to name a few—and this doesn't even include Small Pieces Loosely Joined or Everything is Miscellaneous, which are already on my To Read list. My husband will be so thrilled.) I especially love the term groundswell, which is defined as a social trend where people use technology to get things from each other. That's my kind of social trend.

I'm following a new twitter friend in my twitter feed: MashupAwards. The bio reads "The best mashups on the web" and I'm enjoying the exposure to some combinations I probably wouldn't have come across without it. I'm particularly fond of Twistori, which was first tweeted by Gary Chinn, and TwittEarth, a twitter public timeline visualizer that uses fun icons to show geographic location of tweets. Even 2itch, a Google Maps mashup that makes it easy to find restaurants, stores, gas stations, and more which are open 24 hours.

I love the fact that this unassuming little application has exploded in a way that it has become second nature to many of us. More than this, I love how twitter itself has spawned more third party apps and mashups, because it shows the power of the community by taking what we currently do and applying it in ways originally unintended (or at least unconsidered). Mashups push my mind in new directions and, while I might not be the creator, I can appreciate it, use it, and incorporate it into my daily life.

Please sir, may I have some more?

Earlier this week I made a critical digital decision: I made the commitment to upgrade my Flickr account to Flickr Pro. Although I joke about simply giving into peer pressure, in the bigger picture, this is actually a watershed moment for me. Like it or not, I can always find something about myself on Google, which means others can too. Whether I've personally put myself out there or have been placed there by others, I've had a digital footprint for years. Which begs the question: in whose hands--and control-- should I be? When I left home after high school, I took control of my life and my identity. As my real and digital worlds overlap, it's become apparent that I need to take control of my digital identity as well. It's not as hard as it sounds; I've been doing it subconsciously for several years now by slowly consolidating IM screen names, email accounts and social networking sites. I've been using the now relatively ubiquitous digital moniker robin2go so that my online community can easily find me. By any real measure, my online identity as robin2go and my real identity as Robin are so intertwined that I couldn't separate them if I wanted to. And really, I no longer want to.

So now comes the conscious effort of taking control and creating a more professional, well rounded digital existence. Posting on a regular basis to this blog and my other, less... ummm, reserved, blog. Respond to the many blogs and feeds I visit on a daily basis. Creating an actual site rather than leaving it as a parked url waiting for content. Uploading, organizing, and cataloging my digital images on Flickr. Even making my personal space at psu a more integrated site, rather than a bunch of individual templates loosely joined. I know this will take time, finding moments between the full time job at work and the full time job at home, but I'm a creative kind of gal. I've always worn many hats, and this is one for which I am willing to put in the effort and time.

Going pro. I'm ready for it. You, however, might want to take cover.

I have spent THE most amazing day today being a part of the most amazing experience. Today I had the pleasure of attending the TLT Symposium that is the brainchild of Cole Camplese's group at ETS. This is what ALL symposia should aspire to be when they grow up. But how they did it, I believe, is a result of two parts planning, one part social networking, and one part buy in from the very community it helped to create.

Some things really are no different from last year: a one day event, started off by a keynote speaker, and then breakout sessions that focus on (ironic, I know) teaching and learning with technology. Throw in a lunch midway through, and you've got a respectable recipe for a standard one day meeting. So what happened to make this one so different?

Needless to say, the keynote speaker was beyond extraordinary. Lawrence Lessig, father of Creative Commons, was an inspired choice that drove home the concept of shared responsibility for our future as a society. I don't know of anyone in the audience who wasn't affected by the voice of reason, the challenge of his call and the possibilities of tomorrow, if we only use our collective voice today. Having a keynote speaker of this caliber would have been a respectable step up by any measure of success. Yet, this was only part of the equation.

Well, the latest movement afoot in my neck of the woods is trying out Pownce, yet another social platform. Thanks to Cole Camplese, a handful of Twitterites have moved over and are, like myself, straddling the two systems. There have been several tweets by others who have (one guesses) previously tried Pownce, but I'm not sure you can really decide unless you give it that old college try. Being who I am, I also include the ability to go mobile with the platform, as I am always on my BlackBerry (mom's CrackBerry, as my kids affectionately call it)  and I think that has become an integral part of the social experience. So here are the little things on usability that I've noticed.

• On a mac at work, I have interacted in Twitter almost exclusively in Twitteriffic, a great little app with a small footprint that sits on my desktop and keeps me in the loop. I love it because it's small, but there. I can ignore it, I can follow it, I can go off to a meeting, come back and catch up quickly. Better still, being a keystrokes grrl, I love being able to reply or direct message with simple keystrokes so I can basically get straight to my own tweet.  The only downside I experience is that occasionally I miss some tweets, and not sure I know why. Usability: A-

• Pownce has a nice looking interface, and I really like the threaded discussions. At first glance, it looks slicker than Twitter. More sophisticated. But does this really mean it's better? I have to actually go to a webpage and, sad to say, I don't do that often enough. This might be a trainable point, but do I really want to be trained? Usability: B