TLt Decompression 1: Meeting old friends for the first time

Every once in a while, someone asks me why I blog. My answer is that if I don’t, my head will explode. TLt summit 2008 just ended this afternoon and I am in need of some decompression after all that mental stimulation.

TLt feels like it has been the best conference I have ever been to. Keynote speakers were great, presentation and workshop sessions were challenging and exciting. But the best component of the conference by far was the people I talked with and spent time with. There were a good number of old friends including my compadres in the EdTech Posse – Rick, Heather, Dean and Alec.

I also had the slightly surreal experience of meeting some people who were already my friends and acquaintances, via blogs and twitter, for the first time. I’d been reading D’Arcy Norman and Brian Lamb on their blogs for about as long as I’ve been blogging, and more recently in twitter-space. Jennifer Jones entered my personal blogosphere more recently but she’s quickly become one of my favourite reads as a blogger and one of my top twits (if you’re not on twitter, you’ll just have to trust me that twit is a honour not an insult). I had met Kelly Christopherson once before, but apart from that we’ve been in touch online. I’ve worked with Kyle Lichtenwald on the EC&I 831 class, but never met him in person. I also met some of the EC&I 831 students, like Cindy Seibel and Dan Shellenberg, face to face for the first time. Talking to them in person felt very strange and surreal at first, but that faded quickly. There were jokes (at least I think they were jokes) made about not being able to speak to each other in more than 140 characters at a time, or about not having anything to say to each other. That never happened – I think the conversations would still be going if the conference hadn’t ended and we all had to go home. By the way, if you noticed that twitter was working a lot faster the past couple of days, that’s because we were all in the same place so we could talk to each other directly.

I could at this point start a long thoughtful analysis about social capital and the strengthening of online communities based on face to face contact, but I’m not in an interpretive mood right now. Instead I’ll just enjoy the memory of hanging out with such smart and cool bunch of edtech nerds.

Hmmm – I’m pretty sure I did something else at the conference, but what was it? Oh yeah, the speakers and presentations … but that’s for another post.