There is, not surprisingly, a lot of conversation about EduBloggerCon, NECC and such. Will and Ewan have weighed in with their thoughts about unconferencing and whether or not EBC was a success, how to handle NECC, etc…  and you can also read what Bud and David were thinking during the conference. And then you can read a really strong piece about what Jeff needs from EBC and the Blogger Cafe, and what’s best about that piece is that it’s a really personal reflection about his needs from an event like this.

There’s a lot for us to think about in terms of learning theory in all the commenting about EBC and NECC that’s going on. Most folks can and do learn in different modalities, and many folks have ways they most prefer learning. The debate around lecture v. conversation v. hallways v. classrooms is, in many respects, not that dissimilar to the debate around traditional learning and progressive learning and all the other debates.

Schools — progressive or traditional — are generally considered formal learning environments. Now, all along the continuum of pedagogical beliefs, schools make that formal learning look incredibly different. But 99% of schools have something called "class" that meets at a formal time. That’s o.k. — there are ways to do that really, really well. Most of us have had classes we loved and classes we hate.

There are other spaces — museums are a great example — that are official "informal" learning spaces. Many of us like learning in those environment as well. That’s cool. Most of us can think of a bricks and morter places where we were supposed to learn on our own, and we either did or didn’t.

And then there’s the whole online thang… and there’s a lot of time and energy being spent right now trying to figure out how best to formalize the informal learning that can happen on line. And again, there’s some good ways to do it, and some less than good ways to do it.

But — and here’s the thing — there’s not a right or wrong answer to whether or not you want to learn formally or informally. And most folks probably want some hybrid of the two. The answer is to reflect on what you want, how you want it to look, and — and here’s the next thing that I think is really important — what’s the pedagogy that allows you to learn best in either or both sessions. And yes, formal learning sessions lend themselves to certain pedagogies and informal learning sessions lend themselves to certain pedagogies, but I’ve seen the Blogger Cafe turn into a lecture, and I’ve seen really interactive sessions.

I keep, like Jeff, have spent at least part of my time this week thinking about NECC through the lens of EduCon, the much smaller conference we at SLA put on. With that, we were able to define a broad pedagogy for the conference, and we could provide protocols so that the structure of the sessions were pedagogically aligned with what we hoped the content of the sessions. And we set up spaces and times where people could talk and think and breathe a lot. Our goal was that when there were sessions going on, people were in them, but that people had the time and space to reflect and think and breathe in between them. (Interestingly, the one time we saw a lot of folks vote with their feet was when we tried to do a structured reflection session.) But again, that’s a whole lot easier to do with a few hundred people than with 12,000. (Hm. I like small schools, I like smaller conferences. Is there something to be said for internal consistency?)

So what’s the answer? I don’t know. I admit, I think I like my conferences smaller. I was rushing from a meeting to Will’s session yesterday, and I didn’t know what building it was in, let alone what room it was in. But I also love that there are so many great people who come together here, and that only ever seems to happen at NECC.

I think that what made EduBloggerCon really special last year was a) the sense of newness both of the idea and of the relationships of the people in the room. There were so many people who met for the first time last year. That’s hard to recapture, but b) it felt like EduBloggerCon offered something very different than the rest of NECC, and perhaps in our excitement about EBC, we basically created a structure that was much like the structure of NECC, which makes it harder to differentiate. c) I think it is important to remember that a lot of people did get a lot of EBC, which means that some of what we have to remember is that, especially without a defining pedagogy, the experience that people take away from a conference will be wildly divergent.

Perhaps the solution to all of this is doing more reflection before we attend conferences so that we have a sense of what we want out of them. I did a paradigm shift on Sunday night where I realized that I needed NECC to be something different than the path I was heading down, and I made a conscious effort to change my experience. I wish I had done that before I came down, because there are a few things I really would have chosen to do differently. There are a lot of different kinds of experiences you can have here, between poster sessions, birds of a feather meetings, keynotes, the exhibit floor, etc… it is a massive conference with stakeholders of every level, and therefore the experiences that people have are completely different. The trick may be to be reflective ahead of time about what you want — and what kind of learning environments and social environments (given Dean’s very smart post) you want from the conference and then actively seeking out the experiences that could fulfill you.

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