homoLudens

I don’t have any detailed notes from Boston’s bloggerCon. It was scaled so that everyone could talk
to everyone. Various folks have thoroughly archived sessions and
content. Problematic issues with pricing and access can be addressed with a simple
formula: Make such gatherings ubiguitous and increasingly local. Some
reflections:

Day 1 - Education panel:

• Reminded again of the great difference in working
  conditions in the worlds of k-12 and university education. Of five
  excellent panelists, there were three at universities, one in a
  library, and one at k-12.  Another k-12 might have helped round
  out perspectives on blogging’s value and challenges. And given the
  participants’ reactions to any mention of librarians, how about a
  librarian panel next year?
• Later in the conference there was mention of a need for “case
  studies” in all of the panel areas. In Writing Project jargon, we’d
  call it “teacher inquiry.” With next year in mind, Bryan Bell, Erin
  Clerico and I have started just that.

Day 1 - Political panel:

• Personal “a hah” moment. Rendevous notified me that a wifi
  connect was available through some smart person’s allowing their iBook
  to play hub. Wifi showed me some of Gal’s S.L.A.C.-ers online in a
  chatroom. That led to three seniors in San Francisco watching the
  panel’s webcast, some intense IM coaching on question formation, and a
  good question being directed to the panelists by school
  newspaper
  editor Jean Lee. Before the question was asked, the room
  applauded her presence. Applauded at Harvard Law at age 17. Cool.
  Cooler still, her question to the panel (”Hey if we use a blog to write
  about
  our issues, are you guys going to read it?”) led to an idea for
  re-desgin of the blogTheVote2004 initiative. That should be done within
  a week.

Day 2 - Audioblogging - the next frontier. If I could jettison my
library warehousing work while keeping my tech leadership clout, I’d
devote my time to this area.

• Missed
  most of Harold Gilchrist, who, it seems, attended my sister-in-law’s fourth grade class in
  Iselin, NJ. He’s working as a systems admin for Piscataway School
  District and has managed to get three or four wireless laptops labs up
  and running in schools. His fantasic audio stuff is an after-hours work of love. Samples and much more can be found at his site.
• The second presenter mentioned key issues: broadcast
  vs. video editing; just in time editing tools; putting the grammar of
  interaction on the client side; make it hard to make and easy to listen
  too; including rss into the listening process, with themp3 file enclosures downloads running at night
• And lastly, we were introduced to Chris Lydon’s radioBlog studio, with  equipment specs on the Media Skybuilders website.
  Interesting that some of the high end equipment works no better than
  low end. Sounds like a pretty good recording studio could come in at
  under $300.