Social Media and Conferences

Yay another guest post! This comes from Kymberli Mulford, who is an ed tech blogger at Onionskin and a mom blogger at This Mommy Gig from Chicago.

There’s a little event taking place in San Antonio just over a week from today…

It’s called NECC 2008, and it’s presented by ISTE – who bills this event as “the world’s largest educational technology conference for teachers and technology coordinators.”

Nearly 20,000 people will attend this event, and thousands more across the country and around the world are looking forward to attending “virtually” – anticipating live streaming audio/video and archived pod/vodcasts, planning to check into any number of chat rooms organized by attendees or presenters for backchanneling experiences, or even just following along on the main thread of discussions via the hundreds of live bloggers.

I use these terms casually when I talk about these things with my friends and family who work in the business world, and I often get the deer-in-the-headlights look. If you, as a businesswoman or man, know what all of those terms mean to the world of teaching, then I believe that you are in the minority.

As a teacher, as an educational technology facilitator, as a technology director for a school district – I have watched the world of professional development in education as I once knew it literally disappear with the advent of tools available via the internet. In the world of education, Web 2.0 has transformed conferences and the world of those who make their living by speaking at these conferences.

No longer do presenters (in my world) assume that they are getting paid to speak only to the hundred or so people in that conference room. They suspect – maybe even expect – that someone in the group will live stream their presentation to the internet for consumption. It is hoped that permission will be asked before this takes place, but honestly, this is pretty new, and the rules are being made up as we go along. I’ve seen my share of streams that were not pre-approved. Some presenters go so far as to take charge of the technical details themselves, pre-arranging their own live stream and promoting it well in advance of the actual event. (Sidebar: As a matter of fact, my Twitter network was abuzz on the day of Apple’s latest announcement. Not about the product nor its fabulous new features, but about why Apple couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t fork out the money for better streaming coverage. Millions of people “listened in” via a poor quality audio streams provided by a few attendees. It reminded me of people huddling around old-time radios.)

At any rate, all of this “progress” in the world of presenting at educational technology conferences has caused a little bit of an issue. Hotels and convention centers don’t always have the bandwidth to support this type of activity. This, it seems, might be part of the reason that the controversy has arisen in recent days.

Wes Fryer was one of the first to alert us to ISTE’s new policy. Shortly after that, Miguel Guhlin posted his disappointment at the policy, along with steps to take if you want to join the protest. In the early evening hours, Twitter was again lit up with the controversy, and Stuart Ciske captured the heart of the discussion well on his blog. Many others are even more outraged, as evidenced by postings like this one by “Mrs. Durff”, in which leaders in educational technology are removing themselves from participation in the NECC Ning, etc.

Overall, I think educators tend to share resources and methods extremely well. Overall, I think educators tend to be optimistic in situations such as this. Overall, I think the attendees and presenters – and the international community that was planning to participate from afar – is still hopeful that ISTE will rethink this move.

At any rate, I’m interested in this topic on so many levels as it relates to the business world. I’m curious about how this will play out as the same questions are raised at professional conferences in marketing, banking, medicine, manufacturing, etc. What are your thoughts, as it relates to your business niche?