Come to edcamp philly!
I was really rather bit of a terrible tease in my last post with promises of a “big, big announcement,” and then I left all three of my readers hanging terribly by never making the announcement here. I aim to fix that now by informing you that if you live anywhere within easy driving distance* of Philadelphia, you must come to edcamp philly on May 22!
edcamp philly is an unconference, which means it’s not like any other conference you’ve ever been to! Instead of the incredibly intelligent and good-looking organizers picking and choosing the schedule of the day’s events, we place that in the hands of the attendees. At the beginning of the day we’ll have an ominously empty schedule board that we expect the attendees to fill up. Fill up with awesomeness, that is! People do that for the first couple hours or so, do the meet and greet, and plan out the day.
So why am I, along with all of the other organizers, doing this? We have seen it in action ourselves! Back in November a whole bunch of teachers went to Barcamp Philly, which is a general sort of unconference. Most of us had never met in person before that morning. We kind of loosely talked online about ideas for a presentation that we could do, and a couple of days before we decided on a topic for the presentation. On the morning of Barcamp, we met up, chose a time and room for our presentation, and got to work on actually making the presentation. Five hours later, we presented the Social Media Survival Guide for Schools. While presenting, we met a couple of other awesome teachers presenting right after us, and, even though we didn’t quite know it yet, the core of our organizing uncommittee was born. We added a few more here and there as we went along, leading to a great group of people that I’ve had the pleasure of working with the past few months.
It was a really great day for us at Barcamp, and we want to bring the same fun and excitement we had to the K-12 education crowd. So head on over to http://www.edcampphilly.org and register for the event on May 22, 2010. I guarantee a great day, or you’ll get your money** back!
*My new friend Irene Tortolini has ruined the curve for all of you, because she’s coming down from the Boston area. So today’s definition of easy driving distance is 350 miles.
**Oh yeah, edcamp is a totally free event! So no need to worry about taking a chunk out of your fat-cat union salaries, my public school teaching friends.
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