To get a sense of how getting people together to share ideas and have fun (I have those priorities listed in the wrong order, but I’m in the office right now) can pay off with enhanced augmented capacity, check out D’Arcy’s latest post on the as-yet nonexistent EduGlu aggregator.
I’ve been thinking about this stuff for some time, but the conference allowed me the opportunity to get a sense of how some of my most respected peers were thinking through the issue, and as D’Arcy’s post suggests this theme came up repeatedly.
Not only does D’Arcy make some worthy points, they get followed up by Gardner, Boris (who’s in Europe somewhere right now, talk about being a conscientious commenter!), Bill Kempthorne and Scott — all of whom were very much part of the NV scene last week (Gardner via Skype). I managed to get Jon (a UBC professor who has pushed this concept forward) out to NV and he described what he wanted to D’Arcy and Alan directly over an open-source beer. The conference about blogs sparks a discussion theme, and the blogs provide a medium for pushing the discussion forward so it doesn’t die when the conference ends. (And I see via D’Arcy’s comments that Jon’s remarks at the NV Education Panel will be shared during Bill’s presentation at UVic this week — who knows where it will go from there…)
Increasingly common occurences like this make me increasingly impatient with people who are (still) dismissing this stuff as trivial or tangential, or even sinister. And yes, it still happens. All the time.
FYI, the students D’Arcy refers to are Enej and Tyler (thanks kk+) — and they indeed are tantalizing me with hints of something fun to come along these lines. (They love toying with me like this. Almost as much as I love it.)
