Edinburgh and Return

The last few days have been busy. I flew in to Edinburgh from Portland for Curverider's first conference on social networking tools in education. My trip was relatively short -- I landed on Friday and left Tuesday. While in Edinburgh, I managed to squeeze in a few touristy bits and pieces, but a good portion of every day was devoted to meeting with these guys and this guy. The meetings took place in a series of pubs in Curverider's remote offices, and they were pretty amazing. In the space of three days, we covered a lot of ground, sorting out sundry details of the OpenAcademic roadmap -- including a timeline, the exact structure of the development site, and details relating to single sign on, tag and full text searching across sites, and moving content cleanly between Elgg and Drupal. All of these details will be made public as soon as I clean up my notes.

On a side note, these pre-conference meetings marked the first time many of us had met face to face. For me, this fact illustrates the potential of the tools we are developing -- we all got to know each other as a result of our interest in and involvement with open source social software.

The same idea held true for the speakers and attendees of the conference. The presenters and audience members all looked at the use of these tools with different lenses, but, without the social software tools -- and in particular without Elgg itself -- it's pretty likely that this meeting would not have been possible. Seriously -- what are the chances of getting a Canadian distance learning research chair together with a researcher from an art school together with the head of a British school together with a distance learning director and doctoral student from Florida together with a Scottish K12 educator and edublogger? On paper, the niches are pretty disparate, to the point where meaningful interaction would seem unlikely. However, because we all are using a common tool that breaks down some of the traditional barriers impeding connections among likeminded individuals working in different fields, we all chose to come together and talk things over.

I could tell you about the presentations, but you don't need to take my word for it. Mark Berthelemy has a good overview of the sessions, and soon, you will be able to check them out on Google Video. After the conference, a good portion of the attendees tossed back a few pints continued the edtech discussion. Many blogworthy ideas/opinions were bandied about in this post-conference session, but I ain't sayin nuthin.

Personally, like many others have said, I enjoyed the opportunity to attach faces to names. I had been familiar with the work and thoughts of many of the people at the conference, and it was fun to see the person behind the avatar.

So, as I sit in my cramped seat (believe it or not, it's true -- developers of open source projects do indeed travel coach) in the middle of my return to Portland, I have a headful of ideas to blog, a stack of notes to organize, and a to do list as long as my arm. In setting priorities, I think it best that I give some extra weight to the elements that get the development community online, so I'll probably be engaging in less talking and more doing (or, as Elvis says, a little less conversation, a little more action please), but either way, some Good Things are afoot. We'll be updating progress announcements to the blog as they come online. Stay tuned.