Second Life NECC 2007 Birds of a Feather Video!!!

It's at the Scott in Second Life blog. Have at it! Oh heck, let's repost it here!

Thank you Zsuzsa Thomsen! You ROCK! I SAW you with that videocam. You did a great job of grabbing pieces of the hour and a half fun-fest that Jeremy and I did before he lost every electronic connection he had when his power went out from the San Antonio thunderstorm. It's always something!!!

Day1, Saturday, the Edubloggercon "Unconference"

Made it down for the start of the edubloggercon "unconference," a jewel of an experience that was so inspirational it may as well have been the entire motivation for my driving down here. The morning session saw me chatting with Vicki Davis, a premier blogger who's CoolCatTeacher blog is a great resource for everyone. The room was full of active conversations as bloggers paired up to "interview" one another in order to flesh out the profiles on the edubloggercon site.

The session broke out into smaller ones and I gravitated to the Second Life session where I got to meet in person many of the amazing new friends I'm meeting in my avatar as "Scottmerrick Oh" inworld. We made some great progress, I think, toward gelling as a group to further investigate how SL can be used in the service of learning. See "Scott Merrick in Second Life" blog for more on that! Will be blogging there a bit later this evening, after finding some food.

That session was called to order by organizer Steve Hargadon and we merged two planned sessions into one called Schools of the Future, led by one of my personal heroes, David Warlick. Wow. I took video the whole time and though I'm sure David will podcast it, I'm working on making that video available. I'm a diehard supporter of audo podcasting, for a number of reasons, but this is one you might want to watch, just to see the engagement and the passion in the eyes of the 40 or 50 teachers in that room. There's hope....

Over lunch break I didn't eat but sat with those who did, catching up with email and formatting some of the video I took with my flipvideo device from puredigital.com. This device is one our tech coordinators at my school are experimenting with this summer, and I'm tellin' you, it's stellar.

After lunch break I caught Rushton Hurley's "Videos and Engaging Learning: session, learning and sharing alot. Rushton's working to save education one instruction video at a time at his unique and cleanly conceived NextVista.org. Join in. Help. Submit your own less-than-five-minute videos to the completely free teacher resource.

Tomorrow it's the grant writing session early a.m. then seat-dropping pamphlets and the like for the Keynote featuring Andrew Zoli, young educational futurist. Then the reception at the Georgia State Aquarium, the largest aquarium in the country, and helping welcome people to the Second Life section of that reception. All's good!

Monday it's a bunch of sessions; the Second Life "playground," showing it to the masses; a photoshoot for ISTE publicity, the SL Birds of a Feather session. That's as far ahead as I can think at the moment, though I'm thinking all the time about my session presentation on Windows podcasting tools come Tuesday...