via Ain’t It Cool News.

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The Rocketeer 20th anniversary from John Banana on Vimeo.

The original comics and movie this is based on are both great. The director of the movie directed the Captain America movie coming out next month. I’m hopeful for a good movie.

I’ve now run two Edcamps, and have attended several more. Almost a year since we got things started in Philly, there’s still a certain magic to walking into a building where you anticipate a day of shared learning and have no idea yet what that learning will be. Seeing the blank schedule board transform in an hour to 40 awesome sessions? Fabulous. It continues to bring me joy to see well over a hundred teachers give up a Saturday so they can learn from each other. There’s power in the network, and Edcamp takes a small part in bringing that alive for the educators who have now attended 17 events across North America.

Speaking of the power of the network, I am so grateful that Edcamp Boston ended up with the team that it did. Liz, Karen, Laura, Greg, Larry, and Steve were all so amazing to work with. My first piece of advice to anybody considering running an Edcamp is to find a good team. What I don’t normally tell them is that by the time you’ve finished your event, you will undoubtedly consider your team good friends. This has now personally held true for both Philly and Boston.

A few lessons learned from this, my second Edcamp as an organizer:

• There’s no need to jump the gun on registration. The longer you can hold off, the better your attendance will be in comparison to your registration, I think. We got antsy at two months before the event, and we really could have waited at least another couple of weeks and been fine.
• If you ask people for a small donation to help with costs when they get their ticket, a lot of them will. The 60 people who supported us in addition to our sponsors really helped make the event possible in a way that wouldn’t have been possible without their generosity.
• Wikis are dead, long live Posterous! We got way more sharing out of attendees by using Posterous than I’ve previously seen at an Edcamp. “E-mail it” is way simpler to explain and for people to handle than any other platform yet.
• Eat lunch on site if at all possible. Having people go elsewhere compels them to split into groups of people they’re familiar with. This leaves newbies out of the mix, which hurts the point of the day. It also means you get to save time for sessions.
• Longer days are ok. We were a bit worried by going practically nonstop from 8AM to 4:30PM, but we shouldn’t have been. The day flew by. We fit in five sessions and a Smackdown, which made for a jam-packed day of awesomeness.
• Give people a reason to stick around. Doing the Smackdown at the end of the day was a great way to have a shared ending to the day, and we were really pleased to see how many people stuck it out until the very end.
• If there’s more than one Edcamp on the same day, be sure to collaborate! At the end of the day we checked in with Edcamp Detroit, and it was great to extend that feeling of shared learning hundreds of miles west. Kudos also to Mike Kaechele and Marialice Curran for running a joint session on online collaboration between the two Edcamps.

My advice for those attending an Edcamp: try to attend at leat one session outside of your normal routine/comfort range. My favorite session that I attended was run by Jennifer Leung on Theater Games in the Classroom. It was a small group session, just five of us, but I learned a lot about something completely new to me.

Good thing it’s less than two weeks until Edcamp Philly. I’m already going through withdrawal. If you’re in the area, go! If not, check out the Edcamp wiki to see if there’s one coming up near you. Philly will be your final chance to see me run a Things That Suck session in a Very Special Series Finale. I’m officially retiring from TTS after Philly, but I do encourage other people to run their own variations at Edcamps and other events, as I’ve seen Joyce Valenza and Jeff Richardson do so to my immense pleasure.

Bonus advice to organizers: do something to get your mind off of the event the night before. I went to see Thor on Friday night and it was pretty awesome.

So here’s a very random summation of my favorite things from the past year. No, you do not get a new car.

Favorite new job: Technology Integration Specialist at Pine Glen School. I really can’t believe I get paid to work with a bunch of teachers who really care about kids and are willing to try new stuff with their students. It’s not been without its challenges, but I really love this job.

Favorite city to move to: I still miss Philadelphia, but Boston is a great place to live. Great public transportation system takes me to work and frequently downtown into the city, which is an eminently walkable place.

Favorite conference to organize: You already know the answer to this is Edcamp Philly. Look for the sequel this year, as well as Edcamp Boston in May!

Favorite personal triumph: My photo hanging in an art gallery.

Favorite thing to find out I’m good at: I’m not terrible at providing meaningful professional development sessions.

Favorite city I visited: Washington, DC. I went twice, on the coldest days and the hottest days of the year there. I had a good time on both occasions.

Favorite new piece of technology: The iPad. I had access to one for a few months, and it took up almost all of the time I previously spent on my computer. I think that if the new version this year comes through with the hoped-for built-in cameras, it’s going to make for an incredibly strong learning device for the classroom that’s going to be hard to match at the price Apple’s selling it for.

Favorite books: For fiction, it would have to be the book that I just finished on New Year’s Eve, Cast of Shadows by Kevin Guifoile, a meticulously written near-future science fiction murder mystery about cloning and online gaming that repeatedly blew my mind. For nonfiction, Dark Tide by Stephen Puleo is actually both fascinating and has very strong writing. It tells the tale of the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, and Puleo smartly weaves the strands of American life in World War I throughout the story. I came for the molasses, I stayed for the tales of immigrants and anarchists. Special consideration goes to Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter by Seth-Grahame Smith for deftly blending fiction and non-fiction in the funniest thing I read all year. For children’s books, the best thing I read was Savvy by Ingrid Law, a book that reads like the X-Men meets typical Young Adult coming-of-age story, but with probably the most unique verbal style out of anything that I read all year.

Favorite movie: Other movies may have been better, but I most enjoyed Scott Pilgrim vs. the World out of any of the new movies I saw in 2010. It was just pure fun.

Favorite TV shows: Community is the funniest thing on television right now, and The Walking Dead smartly surprises even people who have read the comics by changing things up in smart ways.

Favorite album: Florence and the Machine’s Lungs is pretty much designed with me in mind. Female vocals, orchestral strings, unique percussion, and it rocks? This album grabbed me from the first listen and still hasn’t let go.

Favorite video game: Mass Effect 2. Pretty much every change they made from the first one was for the better.

My Ten Favorite Photos I Took: Click here to view the set on Flickr.

• Blue Beetle #26 – A nearly all Spanish issue, and a delightful story that I (mostly) was able to understand
• DCU #0 – a decent introduction to the DC universe as of RIGHT NOW before things go crazy in Final Crisis
• Immortal Iron Fist #14 – if they ever get around to making that Iron Fist movie, it should be just like this.
• New Avengers #40 – Rewind to past events we glimpsed or had some ideas about from before and get a clearer picture of how the Secret Invasion started
• Thor Ages of Thunder – this book was beautiful and touched my mythology nerd core in all the right places
• American Way – I bought this trade at New York Comic Con for cheap based on vaguely remembering some internet recommendations, and I was not disappointed.  It’s a real world approach to superheroes, placing them in the midst of the civil rights upheavals of the sixties.
• Iron Man: Demon in a Bottle – I was at Borders and saw a copy of this opened on the shelf, so I took the opportunity to sit down and read it before the movie came out this week.  It’s a 30 year old story, and it’s great.  It was also pretty shocking at one point.

TV:

• How I Met Your Mother – some decent fallout from last week which could lead to some shift in the characters
• House – Nice joke played on the peons this week.

Movies:

• Iron Man – Awesome.  Great summer popcorn flick.

Games:

• Just Cause – I wrapped this game up.  It was actually a pretty cool ending that made use of the stunt system nicely.  As I said before, a decent enough $15 game, but not much more than that.  Clocked time, 25 hours or so, but you could do all of the story missions in under 5 hours easily if you don’t run around liberating villages, finding collectibles, and doing sidemissions.
• Mario Kart Wii – I’m really liking this so far.  Beth also enjoys it.  She plays with the steering wheel, while I prefer the wiimote + nunchuck.