Greetings from the November Learning Conference

I am writing from the Alan November Learning Conference in Boston (BLC-08). It's an amazing opportunity to meet and learn from educators from around the world about using technology. It's a wonderful combination of big picture ideas and nuts and bolts tech tips. The best part is that it's not about the latest gadget and how to use it; it's about teaching in meaningful ways and perhaps using technology to do that. The keynote speakers have been funny, inspiring, creative and tech savvy. The other professionals are an enthusiastic and hard working bunch. And it's really interesting to meet people from other countries and learn about how they do what they do.

I felt fortunate to have learned a lot this year, through 23 things exercises and my own professional development, about technology. I have noticed that in the course of just a year jargon that was politely being explained in a speech is now just mentioned as if we all know what it is (ex: blogs, wikis, RSS, aggregators, twitter).

Anyway, I recommend visiting the November Learning site to find conference notes from presentations. there are also tons of podcasts being produced from the conference on all sorts of topics of interest to librarians.

One of the main tenets of Alan November is that students need to be taught how to work through and analyze all of the information and media they encounter, and he has an excellent book and program on the subject. I highly recommend his stuff.