Scott Dennis and I presented at NorthWest eLearn in Vancouver, WA last Thursday and Friday. As usual, I threw my slides on SlideShare before the presentation. On Sunday I got an email telling me my prezi was “hot” on SlideShare. 5300 views later I am wishing I spent a little more time on those slides, but glad so many people have been exposed to the great work being done by the faculty of the Washington State colleges. The first 42 shareable courses of Open Course Library will be available on October 31, 2011. These course materials have already saved WA students hundreds of thousands of dollars. And we’re just getting started. Can’t wait to share it at the 2011 Open Education conference next week.
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This week I tested a new hypothesis: I learned that it’s significantly easier to make friends in a foreign country when you bring a giant, inflatable pink flamingo along for the ride. You don’t even have to speak the language.
I met Floyd at the AECT conference last week in Long Beach, and we hit it right off so I asked for permission to bring my new friend to Barcelona to attend the Open Ed 2010 conference as well as Mozilla’s Drumbeat Festival. Even the airport security guards smiled a little. Several TSA agents gathered and talked quietly, looking over at Floyd from time to time. Mostly, they just couldn’t decide what to do.
I took lots of pictures. Here are some favorites of me and my favorite pink friend meeting lots of nice people in Barcelona. Floyd will be in Jacksonville, Florida next year for AECT 2011. He wanted you to know.
For those of you who are wondering, yes, I built my own battery pack from parts at Radio Shack so Floyd could go wireless. I wanted him to have the full beach experience.
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There seem to be lots of folks running around with PhDs who are unemployed or under-employed (like the guy I met who is an airport shuttle driver in Denver). With so much education, what is keeping these people from their dream jobs? They obviously invested plenty of time on their education, along with thousands of dollars. While there are probably many reasons newly graduated PhDs don’t get hired, I wonder if some of us forget the importance of the networks and relationships that are needed to land a job in academia after graduation. Well-chosen academic conferences are one place to build a professional network.
I spent a few hundred dollars attending ICLS last week, and it was one of the best investments in my education this year. Several people were surprised that I would spend my own money to attend an academic conference. Don’t get me wrong, I would much rather be reimbursed for this kind of thing; but that is not always possible. To me, spending money on a good academic conference is no different than spending money on tuition. I am earning skills, a credential, and a network, and it will take all three to land a good job at a good university (in a place with lots of sunshine, beaches, and low humidity).
Why did I go to ICLS? I went to meet the right people, now that I know my dissertation topic (using TwHistory in the classroom). I presented a poster on TwHistory, which basically served as bait. But I didn’t wait for the professors to just show up. Instead, I attended their sessions, introduced myself, and invited them to come to my poster. Several professors I met last month at AERA came up to my poster and asked me difficult questions about my methodology. Two of the better known history learning scientists spent the next 20+ minutes, beers in hand, coaching me through a more compelling logic model for my dissertation. For the next 2 hours I was asked a lot of questions and given a lot of great feedback on doing historical reenactments with Twitter. I don’t know how to put a dollar value on all of this, but I can only say that it was extremely useful, and well-worth a few hundred dollars. (Plus I got to attend a Cub’s game. What could be better? Well, I guess they could have won.)
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