Inside View from Ireland: My Monday Action Step

May 19, 2012

My Monday Action Step

Bernie Goldbach at #ictedu | Image is KT Tunstall's boot

THE ANNUAL ICTEDU Conference ended in Thurles with a call to action for Monday's #edchatie and mine came into focus during a workshop by Mary Loftus.

I want to inject more multimedia into my lectures, not as content but as pause points for meaningful discussions. Mary Loftus has perfected the process and its one that will take some re-rigging of the seating plan in the main lecture hall used on our LIT-Clonmel campus but the result makes the effort worthwhile. Seating arrangements featured throughout the day-long event, starting with the opening session when people were invited to sit down in front of the auditorium to share thoughts by writing on tables.

It will take a month of education conferences before I unpack all the thoughts arising from the eighth running of the annual #ictedu event. When it first ran, most of the conference dealt with electronic plumbing. By 2008, tweets were coming out from the event but nothing was reverberating back into the conference via social media. In 2012, twice as many people were following the day's events at a distance, using Twitter, YouTube, SlideShare, and the live video stream. It's reached a point where a virtual conference facilitator should be empowered to bring the outside comments into the main floor, similar to the role a studio wrangler performs for broadcasters.

Black Horse and Cherry Tree

I brought several lovely tracks from KT Tunstall onto my phone during the conference, inspired by the video below the break.

Mary Loftus used "Black Horse and a Cherry Tree" to prove the elegance of multitasking. It's one of several powerful takeaways from Mary's slide deck on the Space Online Continuum.