Unconferencing at Ulearn

Today I spent time at the 'unconference' sessions at Ulearn. An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants during the course of the event. It is a BYO session in which delegates can introduce a topic, discuss an opinion, or share a viewpoint about a subject.

The principles of 'Open Space' unconferences are:

1. Whoever comes are the right people.
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
3. Whenever it starts is the right time.
4. Whenever it is over it is over.

I connected with and shared about Netvibes. In 2005, netvibes pioneered the personalized homepage as alternative to traditional web portals. Netvibes lets individuals assemble all in one place their favorite widgets, websites, blogs, email accounts, social networks, search engines, instant messengers, photos, videos, podcasts, and everything else they enjoy on the Web.

I had a great discussion with Richard van Dijk from the Educated Kiwi about the wiimote interactive whiteboard. He had some great tips for pen design and shared how Te Puke High School are using them in classrooms. There is great potential here and I plan to go back and work some more on my own designs.

I shared Adobe Connectnow with Jamin Lietze. Connectnow is part of their Acrobat.com suite. It is a virtual meeting tool and combines desktop sharing, shared documents, whiteboard space and video chat all within the one tool. Our cluster will be using Buzzword, Adobe's online word processor to write our final milestone draft, so it will be good to see if we can use this tool in that process as well.

And finally I joined in a discussion with Neil Melhuish, David Young and Fiona Grant about the future of ICTPD in NZ. Neil was looking for feedback and ideas on the ICTPD contract. No firm view on what ICTPD may look like in the future...still early days yet.

All in all, this has been a great conference experience this year. A good mix of future thinking with some practical classroom tools and ideas to take back to my cluster.