Our “Tweeting from the Titanic” workshop began with a presentation to familiarize participants with how we use Twitter to share historical reenactments (we call it TwHistory). During the second half of the workshop participants researched several characters from the Titanic crew and quickly created nearly 100 tweets that were scheduled and shared that night at dinner. Due to the lack of time, we allowed participants to take some liberties during the workshop, creating a sort of virtual role play based on first-hand accounts. You can see the Titanic resources we prepared, as well as the Titanic Tweets Google Spreadsheet we used to coordinate it all. While we weren’t able to broadcast the tweets on the exact day of the tragic sinking (April 15), we tried our best to tweet at the appropriate times, adjusted for our timezone (GMT-6). I would love to extend this and prepare a more robust, historically sound version for the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, which will take place on April 15, 2012.

I should also mention that there is another TwHistory workshop coming up in October at the 2010 AECT convention in Anaheim, CA. We are preparing a reenactment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and participants will have the opportunity to create some of the tweets for Black Sunday (October 27th), which happens to be the day of our session. I’m looking forward to that one! Here are the details of our AECT workshop:

11-R6:

TwHistory Workshop: Tweeting the Cuban Missile Crisis

Workshop participants will be introduced to TwHistory, a framework for creating and sharing historical reenactments with Twitter. They will be guided through the process of researching and creating tweets for the historical figures they will represent in an online Cuban Missile Crisis reenactment. The combined tweets will form a reenactment that will be shared via Twitter and TwHistory.org during the 2010 AECT conference and coinciding with the 48th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Welcome to TTIX!

Earlier today I was crowned “Grand Poobah of Social Media” at this year’s Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange (http://ttix.org). This honor came shortly after Chris Lott’s closing keynote in which I realized that I would probably be better off if I tweeted less and meditated more. But now I carry a new mantle, an unexpected honor I earned by blasting out conference tweets and links like a mad man. I can’t complain. They gave me an iPod Touch.

Beyond the iPod Touch and the whole Grand Poobah experience, some highlights from this conference for me were chatting about Twitter as an engine with Scott Leslie at Sundance, catching up with David Wiley (finally!), and presenting with Marion Jensen on Augmented Field Trips using whereigo. Jon Mott’s Building a loosely coupled gradebook presentation and Chuck Wight’s Engaged or enraged? Courting the online learner with lessons learned from video games were also stand outs for me. And there was also the purchase of a Yamaha LD-10 guitar on the way home. What could be better?

Does this hat make me look like a Grand Poobah?

Every one of the keynotes was first rate. Brian Lamb threw it down with style with his presentation on The Urgency of Open Education. I love Brian’s question, referring to the thousands of cameras taking the same picture during Barack Obama’s visit to Berlin: “Was anyone in the audience really worried that this was going to be aptly documented visually?” I enjoy his perspective as he looks into the participatory culture of social media. Scott Leslie’s The Open Educator As DJ was both interesting and a visual breath of fresh air. Scott used a tool called Prezi — you just have to see it for yourself: http://prezi.com/66159/. Finally, Chris Lott really brought it home with his closing keynote, which takes a fresh, honest, philosophical look at at education. He started out sitting us down in Plato’s dark cave, and took us on a guided tour of the history of ideas. I’m so glad there are still people like Chris out there to remind me to be honest and humble about my learning journey.

This conference was packed with great sessions and (more importantly) with great people. When I tweeted something about TTIX saving the best sessions for last Scott Leslie replied that he disagreed because all the sessions were great. Looking back I have to agree. Kudos to the Marc Hugentobler (diamond_mind on Twitter) and the rest of the UVU TTIX team! I’m already looking forward to next year, and not just because I get to wear the Grand Poobah hat!