[Sort of a stream of consciousness… hopefully, more than notes, but definitely not all that coherent.]

Wes Fryer, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Darren Kuropatwa and others…

Talking about blended professional development. How do we learn differently today?

Bud Hunt talking about how to harness the content — putting together a Moodle Course / Face to Face meeting — professional development credit for people who would use the content of K12Online to spark a conversation about our own classes. K12Online is a "learning object repository." This is a great way to create meaningful content.

What’s the benefit of getting outside the local issues and engaging in a world-wide professional development. Keeps us from continuing to perpetuate that which we know. Allows us to see that others across the country, across the world struggle with and solve the same problems that we struggle with in our own districts.

April Chamberlin — Trussville, AL — bringing people (teachers, admins) together in an auditorium to watch the keynotes together. Our experts are worldwide and we can interface with them whereever they are.

Jeff Utecht — Talking about the Shanghai LAN Party and how it affected learning. Four Saturday mornings at Jeff’s house, potluck breakfasts, and people watched the keynote together, then watched different sessions, and then everyone did a podcast at the end. The idea that people watching the online conference were then creating more content. Over four weeks, the energy grew and grew. Jeff also worked with Plymouth State to get his teachers professional development credit. The teachers must watch sixteen hours of the conference and write reflections either on a Moodle course, comments on K12 site or on their own blogs.

Wes — this is not "bell bounded" learning. It is learning unbounded. (me) What I like, however, is listening to how people took all this content and structured meaningful community learning experiences around it. I think I’ve got a lot to do.

The Live Events — Sheryl — "The Fireside Chat" / "When Night Falls"

Wes asks / talks about… how do we sustain conversations over time? Great question… and a great way to think about all this. These conversations are extended… and I’ve felt that powerfully this year, that so many of the conversations I’ve had with people are extensions of blog posts, other conference conversations, Skype calls. There is a real sense of a learning community to me, in that I have a sense that this conversation is getting richer, building off of so many other conversations.

Darren talks about how people have an innate urge to connect, and K12Online, especially the live events, allow for that connection, and I think that’s true. There’s something special about that sense of connection, where you can learn with and from others.

Dean is also talking about how many speakers took their presentations out into the world… and there’s a really important idea to tease out here. We can take our classrooms outside of the walls. I think that structure is just a great model to remind us of how we can change our classrooms too.

This really is a for-us-by-us conference. With all the work that the conveners do, there’s no one making any money off of K12Online. I feel the same way about K12Online as I do about EduCon — there’s something different about going to a conference / taking part in a conference that you know is not getting anyone paid. There’s nothing wrong with someone throwing a conference as a living, that’s fine. But there’s still something special about people doing things as a full-on labor of love.

Some things I want to do — can we get a team of schools together to watch K12Online and talk about how it can change our schools, but also, there are a lot of these which can serve to enhance teacher craft at SLA. There are so many really amazing workshops, that this can serve to help teachers when Marcie’s just-in-time learning. I think it’s just a question of teaching teachers to use the tags of K12Online sessions to find the information they need.

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