PodcasterCon 2006

A HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who attended PodcasterCon! Your active participation made it the huge success it was. Thanks to the people who came together online before hand and got this organic unconference going!

Many people wondered before the event what an unconference was. It is a rather strange idea to wrap your head around. But it’s liberating once you do it. To me it’s the feeling of having a bit of control over the outcome of your life. To partner with others and take some control - to learn, to grow, and to create. I think the people who attended PodcasterCon got to experience this. But each of us had a unique individual experience. I hope yours was possitive.

What’s really interesting to me is that an unconference is larger than a single definition. It’s a distributed concept not a unified concept. Each and every person is a node in the social network of the unevent that makes up an unconference. The Internet itself is our greatest example and analogy of an unsystem. It prepared us to work together in a network centric manner in a physical space.

Also big thanks to our financial donors and our volunteers. Without your help I wouldn’t have been able to pull this off. I’m still a bit overwhelmed and can’t believe it’s over. I am so happy and proud. With time I’ll have more to say…

There is LOTS of information from the event to aggregate and share. It’ll take a little while to bring together. But once the PodcasterCon site is reorganized a but it will transform into a organizing tool AND a podcasting educational resource.

The small towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro have a long reputation of incredible rock n’ roll music, hip hop, DJs of all kinds, experimental, country and western, rock-a-billy, Elvis impersonators, etc., etc. Saturday night after PodcasterCon is no exception. We can rock tha house like we we’re in NYC or San Fran and do it cheaper than hell!

Check out this diverse and talented line up of FANTASTIC music that’s available for you to see in Chapel Hill after PodcasterCon. This is really a wonderful night with lots of SERIOUS local talent. See the schedule for even more info about the event.

Local 506, 506 W. Franklin Street, bar/rock club
Elvis Fest - TWO DOLLAR PISTOLS (AMAZING Country and Western band!), STRAIGHT 8′S, HILLBILLY WEREWOLF, BUTCHERS, DEFILERS

Cat’s Cradle, 300 East Main Street, Carrboro (you can still walk here from Chapel Hill) - famous regional and national acts
Earthquake Relief Benefit Concert - The Capulets, 40 Oz, The Means, Tim Carless, On Three, All proceeds donated to “Doctors Without Borders” for relief work in Earthquake Devastated areas of Pakistan.

Nightlight - 405 1/2 W. Rosemary St., Eclectic Live Music and DJs
Sat 1/7 - RECESS! Our semi-monthly experimental/improv night featuring one-off performances by local musicians. TONIGHT: sets by Zeke Graves (ColdSides), Mike Walters (JettRink), Joshua Willis (BonerMachine), TJ Ward (YUGEN). 10PM / $5.

The Wetlands- 157 E. Rosemary St.
Saturday, January 7 - 10pm Cover $6
L IN JAPANESE (HipHop DJ straight outa Paris), ADAM ROTTIN, THE LICK, and SOCIAL MEMERY COMPLEX

The Cave - 452 1/2 W. Franklin St., Bar with small stage, bands almost every night
Sat. 1/7 Early Big Foam Finger, Late The New Twilighter.

Originally posted on 2¢ Worth, Jan 3, 2006

I’ll be facilitating the Podcasting as a Teaching/Learning Strategy session at PodcasterCon on Saturday (January 7). If you haven’t registered already, and are within driving distance of Chapel Hill (which a good part of the U.S. population is), please consider coming.

The education session will be especially interesting for two reasons. One is that there will likely be equal mixes of participants from the K-12 arena, from higher ed, and folks who are not directly involved in education at all. The perspectives are varied, and I hope that an open and lively sharing will be beneficial for all communities of interest.

The second reason is that Podcasting, like so many technologies as they are initiated in education, is a solution without a problem, a hammer without a nail. In June, I attended Apple’s unveiling event for iTunes 4.9 at the National Educational Computing Conference in Philadelphia. Andy Carvin (Waste of Bandwidth) and I (Connect Learning) recorded a co-podcast while in line (with hundreds of educators), waiting for admittance to the way too small room. We interviewed many of the people who are in line, and not one could comfortably describe what a podcast was. None had ever produced a podcast and only a couple had heard one. But they were all there, because it was the buzz of the conference.

In preparation for this session, I ask a couple of education technology mailing lists for some essential questions that we might tackle in the Saturday session. Leslie Simonfalvi, a teacher educator in Budapest, put it very well as she asked how we might utilize podcasting and other emerging technologies when “…quite a few students, especially gadgetophiles, think about modern learning modes as escape routes.” She continues with some typical alibis, which I included on the sessions wiki page.

In my opinion, students view technology as an escape route because they see such a vast distance between the learning experiences of their classrooms and the information experiences that they have invented using IM, text messaging, blogging, networked video games, etc. We’ve left it up to them to meld these new technologies into their lives while we have been too cautious about adapting our classrooms and curriculums to the changing information environment.

I have some ideas and most of them come from a handful of innovative educators who have invented new teaching and learning strategies around media production and narrowcasting, and I’ll share them on Saturday. But I think that the real value of this session will be a mixing and remixing of perspectives that we will all learn from.

Hope to see you there.

Does anyone need a ride from the airport or train station? Would you like to share the cost of hotel room with someone? Please leave your info and needs in the comments of this blog post. As always use common sense when dealing with strangers on the Internet. Let’s try to work together to help everyone make it to PodcasterCon.

At the very beginning of PodcasterCon we’ll all be together in one room. One of the most important things we have to-do is create more session subjects. The fact is we can have more than five sessions. All you really have to do is find someone else interested in what you are interested in and talk about it.

But in an effort to encourage everyone to get creative and document our group knowledge I’ll ask for some session topics from the group and put them up on the blackboard and the PodCon wiki main page. The only requirements to propose a session are:
1) Take good session notes and put them on the wiki
2) Record audio of your session
3) Encourage a group discussion not a one-way lecture

Any ideas that remain that didn’t make it on the PodCon wiki main page can still be put on the MORE Sessions page. Matter of fact you can put session ideas here NOW. So go for it. Fill up this page with ideas you want to discuss. Just include a session title, a description, and your name. If you put an idea here get ready to really talk about it and fulfill the requirements I mentioned above. (Session “requirements” and methods may change some before and during PodcasterCon. Let’s be flexible.)

Also if you’ve registered you can add information about yourself on your own page. Goto the People Who’ve Registered page on the PodCon wiki and look for your name. Click on your name and edit away.

Here is a link to Hotels that Google says are near PodcasterCon. I will put up a list of suggestions soon.

PodcasterCon is OPEN in many ways. Here’s a few examples.

• It’s FREE as in free beer. It doesn’t cost money to enter.
• Anyone can attend
• Anyone can propose a session subject
• Everyone can talk to each other, if they care too
• Being there physically is ideal but not required.
• It’ll be documented for future use by all
• English may not be the only language used at the event or for documentation.
• White males aren’t the only people who will attend

Events about social movements like blogging and podcasting should be two way read/write activities. To do otherwise is wrong.

What are some other ways PodcasterCon should be open?

That’s what PodcasterCon is going to be, an unconference. AKA a OpenSource Conference. Here are Doc Searls ten suggestions.

(more…)

One of the ways we’re planning to raise funds to build the best podcaster’s conference possible is by selling T-shirts. We already have the silk-screen gear to print the tees; now we simply need a cool tag line and an awesome logo.

If you’ve got some ideas or know a good designer who’d be willing to apply her skills for a good cause, please let us know. Either send your designs and ideas to info (at) PodcasterCon (dot) org or simply refer your designer friends to PodcasterCon.org.

If chosen, you’ll be credited for your contribution, of course - and receive a free T-shirt, too! The winning logo designer will also win a very special prize. Stay tuned for more on that (or listen to the second Planning Group meeting for a hint of what’s to come).

Update: The logo design contest rules will be posted soon. Check back here for the link. -Brian R

Here are the budget estimates for BloggerCon so far.