What I didn’t expect was for people to go to the Media Commons demo area and borrow iPod Touches and take up the charge themselves. I was in a standing room only session listening to Michael Elavasky talking when I noticed the person in the picture below leaning against the wall next to me. He had grabbed a Touch and was capturing the session. Is the quality perfect? Nope. Does that matter to me? Nope. The fact of the matter is that we now have access to so much more history of our own event because the people attending the Symposium both wanted us to capture it and did the amazing part of actually chipping in and doing it!

Because Twitter connected the community a call to arms was heard and a solution was identified and acted upon. The proof is below.

For the last five years we have increased the use of technology in and around the event to try and build more buzz and excitement. Several years ago our hash tag (this year it was #tltsym11) was a twitter trending topic and the use of blogs and iPod Touches (for video capture) has steadily increased as ways to capture and share the event. In the last couple of years I have sensed a huge level of engagement from the staff and a small number of faculty, but this year it was pure energy from the word go across the board. I’m not sure if the community has caught up with the early adopters or if there was something different in the air. Our faculty presentations were without a doubt the best we’ve ever had. Several TLT Faculty Fellows presented their work and their rooms were over flowing. They were like visiting rock stars … so cool to see that kind of energy and change happening on my campus. I can only imagine what our new class of Fellows will bring to next year’s event.

One thing I’ll note is that it seems like the strategy of aligning keynote speakers to annual themes is paying off … the Symposium is now a celebration of the hard work faculty have done through the previous year and a call to arms for the year in advance. I have written about the notion of keynote alignment before, but it seemed evident that Wesch’s keynote last year made an impact on the kinds of talks our faculty gave this year. I am hopeful that our keynote’s talk this year is just as impactful. I will say that Clay Shirky was fantastic and he made several points that are still resonating in my head. His keyntoe is embedded below and well worth the hour. The other thing I think I should mention is that Clay came in early the day before and spent the Friday afternoon with myself and a group of faculty for a two hour conversation … it was an amazing opportunity to engage him in ways that one can’t at a more formal event. If you have the chance to sit down and have a conversation with him, take it! I can’t say enough about his willingness to participate and how gracious he was with his time. I think it made his keynote that much more meaningful to me.

I won’t go into details relative to the sessions I attended, but I will share two more thoughts related to the energy of the day. I have never (and I mean never) seen more people stay from 8 AM until the last bell at our event. The break areas were packed, the sessions were packed, even the halls were packed. The closing session was a panel I moderated on student and faculty expectations of educational technology. What I learned is worth a blog post all by itself, but it was so much fun to get to talk directly to students and compare their reactions to what we do with what we actually think we do. I loved it … It was a great day to be a member of the PSU’s teaching and learning community.

Photo Credit Brad Kozlek

If you live your life working to innovate inside the academy all you have to do is watch the first minute and a half of the above scene from the Hudsucker Proxy and you’ll find yourself in very familiar territory. I especially love that the same questions get asked over and over without even waiting to hear an answer. In my experience the questions are mostly a smoke screen to draw attention away from the real issue — fear. Want to know what I love about the people who will show up at the 2011 TLT Symposium this weekend? They ask questions not to divert attention, but to actually work to understand the potential answers. Bring your questions and your passion … it is on! My favorite time of the work year has arrived!

A few years ago we really wanted to raise the awareness around the importance of remix culture and Creative Commons so we had Lessig join us — less than a year later we adopted CC 3.0 as an accepted licensing model. When we wanted to draw light on the importance of open and social learning we brought David Wiley and danah boyd to campus … no coincidence that we’ve launched our first centrally designed fully open CC licensed online courses built on our social blogging platform. When we wanted to inspire faculty to think about how to engage students in large classrooms we brought Michael Wesch to share his stories … I guess that has something to do with our push to work with faculty in pumping up engagement opportunities in sections of Communications 110 (300 students) and Sociology 119 (725) students. At times it almost looks like we are thinking about this stuff.

So when we had a chance to invite Clay Shirky to be our keynote for the 2011 Symposium we jumped at it. His new book, Cognitive Surplus, is an excellent example of how we are thinking about tapping into our own communities to push our agenda forward. Having Shirky here will inspire new thinking and will challenge all of us to rethink how we can leverage the relationships we’ve created to do even more in the coming year. As always, I am excited by the prospect of another Symposium and of its potential for impacting our campus.

Yesterday I got to spend a few hours with Mike and several PSU faculty talking mostly about digital scholarship, engaging students, and managing the shift that is happening under our feet. Both sessions were wonderfully insightful discussions that I wish we would have captured. I’ll do my best to reflect a bit more on those and the Symposium in general, but for now please stop by and watch!

As in year’s past we will be both streaming and archiving big portions of it, so be sure to check the Symposium site for those details. I love how the energy of this event is built around the idea that it is both the start of another year of innovation and the celebration of what has been done in the recent past. Most of us will be locked into the event starting first thing tomorrow through Saturday night when we’ll collapse. I can’t wait to get things started!

Every once in a while you get to see a mainstream outlet cover a story right alongside a blog, so you can put them up against each other and see why one was so much better than the other. This week TechCrunch and the New York Times photo provided just such a lesson.

via The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Why the mainstream media is dying.

The Symposium team, led by Jeff Swain, have done an amazing job. Everything is first rate — down to the posters, the program, and every other single little detail. We’ll have two keynotes from David Wiley and danah boyd that I think will inspire the collective audiences. Last year we had Lessig who blew open the idea that we should all be rethinking copyright and I know David’s message of open education will help us take the next step. danah will spend time sharing critical insights into the social web and how our audiences participate … it is going to be great! We’ll have man on the street interviewers, a video production team, a demonstration room showing off our Educational gaming initiative, and so much more. The keynotes will be recorded and shared as they happen and all the sessions will be blogged and twittered (watch the hashtag #tltsym09). All in all I expect it to be a great event. Take a look at just one of the videos we produced leading up to the event.

I’ll start by saying the simple first — it was an overwhelming success that only happens when lots of dedicated people come together to show and share their passion. The planning teams thought of nearly everything … as a matter of fact I really can’t point to anything and say, “that could’ve been done this way or that way.” I just can’t. That doesn’t mean we aren’t thinking about how to do just that — you know, make it better. It just means that this year’s event was perfect for this moment in time. I knew it was going to be special when a late night Twitter stream pushed a group of us to create all sorts of stuff built around our people tagging stickers … something strange was happening and it felt really powerful.

What jumped out at me? Let’s see … our keynote speaker, Lawrence Lessig, was amazing. I was one of the lucky ones who got to spend quite a bit of time with him. On Friday alone I had the opportunity to have lunch with him, attended private sessions that we had planned between he and other Colleges here at PSU, and had a wonderful dinner with him that evening. All of it happening on my 36th birthday was an interesting twist — I can only think of one other way to spend a birthday and that is with my family. Friday was an intellectually challenging days on lots of fronts. As an example, working to engage Professor Lessig in authentic dialogue was a complex task — he is a very introspective and quietly intense individual who really takes his time in sharing his thoughts. I don’t want to make too much of it, but he is a model as it relates to really working to understand the dialogue before contributing to it. I guess my point is, if you didn’t challenge him he had little say. When he was asked intelligent questions his answers were of the prose his presentations are made of. It was a pleasure having time with him and as the day wore on he settled into a great rhythm and had plenty to share … one of my favorite quotes of his while speaking to some colleagues from PSU Public Broadcasting was, “Public Broadcasting should pay more attention to the public and less to broadcasting.” That was not an insult, it was a sentiment that everyone in the room wanted to rally behind.

On Saturday Professor Lessig was introduced by our President (who stayed for his entire talk) — BTW, having President Spanier do an introduction would have been unheard of for our modest conference a couple of years ago but there he was sharing insights and generating laughs as he made his remarks. Lessig’s talk was nothing short of breathtaking … all I can say is watch it for yourself and listen to how he crafts a message that tells a story that is so complex but yet shares it in the simplest of terms. It was brilliant and it left all of the 325 or so of us assembled in a state of awe, shock, amazement, and I have to admit, empowered. Where do you go from that? Well, you move into faculty sessions that were fantastic. The thing I noticed about the faculty presentations this year was that they were a heck of a lot more like extended conversations than presentations. No one sent an email to presenters and directed them to think about how to engage the audience — they just all did. Each session I went to is worthy of its own blog post, but that has already happened over at the Symposium site.

The other thing I have to mention here is something that can be observed, but not measured — the emergence of a community. I’ve been saying for quite some time that about a year ago I started to notice that there was a connected learning design community ready to just explode here on our campus … it has been building over Twitter for quite some time, but Saturday it emerged in full force — faculty, staff, and students all engaging in real face to face conversations that were meaningful. Many of these relationships were ones that had started in Twitter, through blogs, or over podcasts. I can’t tell you how many times I heard or said, “it is so nice to finally put a face to your (user)name!” I don’t know how to share how I am feeling about being a part of this community, but it is a great place to be. If you want to see just a little evidence of it all check out the hashtag space, the Flickr photos, or listen to the “man on the street podcasts” … not sure if that even gets at it, but it is a shot.

Sorry for the long post … maybe a couple sentences would have been more appropriate, but this is the best I can do at articulating the feeling I have walking away from the 2008 TLT Symposium. I want to personally thank everyone who contributed to its success and to let everyone know that this year our thinking will be even more wide open with more opportunities available for everyone to contribute. I don’t want to overuse something I just said to the new Symposium project manager, but maybe the “community is the committee” for the next event. Keep watching and keep contributing. Thank you!

At any rate, Lessig gets started this morning after PSU’s President Spanier provides some opening remarks and introductions … I can’t tell you how stunning it is that our little event has ballooned into something of this size on our campus. Not only do we have hundreds of faculty coming from all over the Commonwealth, we have learning designers coming — and that is where the real buzz is. I have been watching the excitement build in my Twitter stream for days and weeks now … it is so cool to see and I am really looking forward to meeting some new friends from my own campus and getting to hang out with the ones I’ve known for years! So, more posts later today both here and at the Symposium site … the Flickr feed of public images is already exploding as is the Twitter space for the Symposium, and the Hashtags site — all worth a peek. I gotta get dressed and get out the door.

Oh, Happy Birthday Dad!