I'm sitting at the 2008 Manitoba Edubloggercon being held at the Princess Street campus of Red River College in downtown Winnipeg.

Eight presentations later things have become a little more organic. People are asking questions and the chat room in Ustream is replying instantly with answers, links, information, and resources to share. John Evans has just invited people to come up to his laptop right now and he's setting them up with twitter accounts so they can start building their personal learning networks. Brian Crosby just skyped in to answer questions about students at risk. People are just starting to get a sense of what comes from sipping the electric kool-aid.

Andy McKiel is the brains and brawn behind all this. He arranged the venue, made sure there was food and drink, coordinated the schedules of eight crazy busy people from two Canadian provinces and Thailand (the airports there are still closed today, Jeff Utecht showed us the role twitter is playing in the capture of the airports). Andy is a class act in everything he does. More Manitoban teachers need to know how fortunate we all are to have him as the President of MANace.

All the talks are (or will be soon) archived on the wiki Andy created for the event. I gave one of the five minute talks. I actually managed to stick to five minutes. It sort of helped that the slideshow was advancing on autoplay. If you're interested in my "5 Minutes to Make A Difference" here is the slidecast:

Awakening Possibilities

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: presentation mbecon08)

Also available as a video archive from Ustream.tv:

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

That sounds a lot better than calling it a pre-SAG event. (If you're not from Manitoba that's the unfortunate acronym for our provincial professional development day organized by the various Special Area Groups we teachers are all affiliated with in one way or another.)

We had a blast last year so we're looking to have a good time again this year. Andy McKiel, president of the Manitoba Association of Computing Educators (ManACE) is the brains behind getting together some food, folks, and fun while we share some ideas about the evolution of teaching and learning today. You're invited to join us!

The theme this year is Awakening Possibilities and Andy has invited me and 7 other people to give short talks as a focal point of conversation for the evening. We're modeling it on Chris Lehmann's breathtaking talk at Ignite Philly last month. We'll each talk for 5 minutes; 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide.

I will be part of the Manitoba contingent as will Chris Harbeck, Clarence Fisher, and John Evans. We'll be joined, via skype and/or Ustream, by our friends and colleagues from Saskatchewan Alec Couros, Dean Shareski, and Kathy Cassidy as well as Jeff Utecht from Bangkok, Thailand.

All the details are in the poster below (download a copy and share it around where you are). Andy built a wiki where you can find more info and a digital archive of the evening afterwards.

Hope to see you there!

I've come close a couple of times but this is the first award I've ever received. I was nominated by Andy McKiel. Andy was unanimously voted in as the new President of ManACE tonight. They also honoured Cheryl Prokopanko (provincial coordinator for Literacy with ICT for the Ministry of Education) with a well deserved Lifetime Achievement Award. Cheryl is a passionate educator committed to helping other teachers learn how to weave technology into their teaching practice and create more opportunities for students to become successful, ethical, lifelong learners. Last year John Evans was the recipient of Educator of the Year Award; I'm in some pretty august company.

This was also the ManACE Annual General Meeting. I got to observe some of the inner workings of the organization. I mentioned to John, as we were leaving, how I was struck by the dedication of this group of educators. Brian Metcalfe, who retired last year as the technology consultant for my school division, was also there. It was wonderful to see him again. His presence really underscored the commitment folks have to ManACE; retirement is no obstacle to the work they do together. In my brief acceptance comments I encouraged the membership of ManACE to participate in the upcoming K12 Online 2008 conference.

I'm honoured to receive the Educator of the Year Award and wanted to publicly thank the board of directors and members of MANACE. In particular, I wanted to thank Andy McKiel; for nominating me, for the kind words he shared about me, and his continued efforts in helping make 21st century education accessible to teachers and students across the province. We've already begun talking about Manitoba EduBloggerCon 2008.

We had a great night! There were over 60 people in the room, some familiar faces and lots of new ones too. My only regret was that I didn't get a chance to talk to and meet more of the people who were there. The real hero of the evening, IMHO, was Andy McKiel, the president of our provincial Ed. Tech. association, MANace. Andy organized the evening and made sure all the technology ran flawlessly. This never would have happened without him. At one point during the evening, all of us who were presenting were chatting; we unanimously shared how grateful we were for all of Andy's hard work. Thanks Andy!

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

I've just updated the Manitoba EdubloggerCon wiki. We had a live Twitter feed and UStream feed. All the videos of the unpresentations can be seen from the Manitoba Edubloggercon UStream account or the wiki.

The next day, yesterday, Chris, Clarence, Dean, John and I had lunch together to catch up and chat. Unfortunately, John had to leave early but as we lingered over the end of the meal, Dean fired up his laptop and started streaming video and audio on his Ustream channel. We were joined for lunch by over 20 people from across the world. We forgot to click the record button so we've lost the video archive but Clarence saved the chat which you can download from his blog or read directly on the MBEdubloggercon wiki (it's easier to follow the links off the wiki page). There was lots of interesting discussion and some good links shared. One of them led me to a voicethread archive of lots of math content that's giving me ideas for how I can use it in my classroom. That's also a resource I can link to and use in my Consumer Math 20S (grade 10, approx. 15 y.o.) class. (My daughter (7 years) and I watched this one this morning and left a comment on the last slide.)

Dean took some photos at lunch. I aggregated them into this voicethread. (I know Dean wants to hear lots of comments about the salad (slide 2) I had with my lunch.) I haven't had a chance to add any comments yet. Feel free to add yours before I do. ;-)

One thing that came out loud and clear (you can see it in the chat transcript) is that our ideas about what good professional development should look like have changed dramatically. It's not worth our time unless it provides an opportunity to engage with what's being shared by dialogging about it. And that dialogue should include global participation via twitter, UStream or some other way to access our learning networks. More than that, archiving the experience somehow is also important. The archive provides people who were there the opportunity to go back and reflect on what they heard/learned/participated in and offers other educators around the world an opportunity to participate vicariously after the event and add their voices to the conversation.

Having been immersed in "networked learning" for a while now, the power of the network to connect and amplify learning still amazes me every time. Even my 7 year old daughter got something out of all this. Thanks to an email I got from Brian Metcalfe (who attended the event on Thursday night) while I was chatting with Dean this morning we're talking about an idea that may make math a little more fun in classrooms across the world, in March ... on the fourteenth, to be exact. ;-) I'll share more about it here as we flesh this out.

Like I keep saying to my students, again and again, "Learning is a conversation. If you're not talking to someone about it, you're not learning it."

Clarence, Chris and I have been talking about this for a while and last night decided to make it happen. We may be a small community but we can do BIG PD just by getting together for some good food, folks and fun. Most of this is mirrored from Clarence's blog ... it may be time to start a new SAG (non-Manitobans, see link below). ;-)

Live in Manitoba? (or going to be in Winnipeg?)

Are you an edublogger or an edublogger lurker?

A big province and a small community of bloggers.

Time for us to get together.

Many people are in Winnipeg for the SAG conferences (if you aren't from Manitoba, don't snicker, we didn't come up with the name) on November 23rd so we think that is a perfect time to get together.

A basically blank wiki has been set up here looking for ideas. These things we know:

• » November 23rd
• » Winnipeg
• » Do you have a suggestion for a place? Leave your thoughts.
• » What about a time? Do we want an afternoon or is happy hour/evening better? You decide.

The wiki has no password set so edit away and if you have any questions, concerns or thoughts, get in touch with any of us. Contact info on the wiki.

You can reach me at: dkuropatwa [at] gmail [dot] com

Hmmm ... y'think we need a badge or something?