Yesterday I attended the first National Education Web Professionals Conference.
There was a wonderful diversity of educational professionals there. The conference wasn’t large enough for break-out sessions so we all were in the same room all day. It was a different but unique and rewarding conference experience. There wasn’t wireless internet access, which was a good and bad thing as we were a captive audience. The keynote speaker was Tony Byrne, founder of CMS Watch. What I thought was most interesting about his speech, was his idea that in order to identify what your district/organization needs from a CMS system, have people create narrative use cases to tell a story, that validates the needs, not just create a checklist of needs. Furthermore, the panels didn’t just present, they told stories about how their topic came to fruition in the district.
Many people in the educational technology world are struggling with blogs, wikis, podcasts, on-line courseware and content management systems (CMS) and how they all fit together. Some of the topics of conversation included Moodle vs. CMS, how do you make all users happy? What does ease of use mean? What content should be internal v. external?
They are hoping to grow the conference and the conversations, hope you’ll think about joining in!! :)
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1 comment:
CMS is a great topic for schools, and there does need to be a way to bring them all together into one system. For Content Management I like SchoolWires, Drupal, Joomla, and for course management I like Moodle. We need to teach students how to use all of these systems and design high school courses around CMS tools. AS for your comment on no Internet at the conference. Just like in a classroom, Internet can be an asset or a distraction, it all depends on the user. At a web conference, no net does seem odd, but I bet no one was distracted!
Hayden
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