Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the 10th annual Penn State Web Conference. This is the second year in a row that I have presented at this conference and it was just as much fun this year. Jim Leous and I revived our Web 2.0 in the Higher Education Enterprise act for this year ... offering a bit of a status update on the state of Web 2.0 stuff going on here at PSU. Sort of cool to look back and see that at this time last year we were presenting dreams about University wide blogging, podcasting, and general Web 2.0 adoption and this year we were able to show what our emerging services look like. What great feeling it is to be talking about reality and not just "imagine if you will ..." kind of stuff. I feel like we have made real progress in the last 18 months or so.
I really enjoying getting to present with Jim ... he has been an innovator on our campus for so many years and he has insight into why things are the way they are that so many others don't. He and I try to make it a fun and light session when we do this and I hope we pulled it off this year. It was also nice to see the conference bring a blog online this year as well as encourage people to tag items in del.icio.us and Flickr with "psuweb2007" ... walking the talk is an important piece to the puzzle. By all accounts it seemed like a successful day and one that hope continues to push our overall awareness towards emerging web trends forward. I will also say it is so good to see close to 300 people (all from PSU) kicking the web tires. The next step has to invovle getting members of this community together with the learning design community in some sort of un-conference way to really get the conversation rolling. No matter how you cut it, I had a good time today.
My schedule continues to be hectic as tomorrow it is off to Pittsburgh to spend time learning more about Google and what they do ... that should be a blast. Back in town Wed and getting ready for another talk at the Technology in Business Education conference. Again, new audiences and new challenges ... should be fun and interesting. I will attempt to post thoughts about it all as it happens.