Heartland eLearning Conference with Michael Wesch: 7-8 March 2011 in Edmond, OK #HeartlandConf11

Make plans to attend the 2011 Heartland eLearning Conference March 7-8, 2011, in Edmond, Oklahoma at UCO. Today is the last day for discounted pre-registration.

The keynote speaker on March 8th is Dr. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University, and I can’t tell you how enthused I am to hear him present in person! Up to this point, my contacts with him (besides learning from his online videos and work) have been listening to his BLC 2010 keynote on Bob Sprankle‘s Bit by Bit podcast channel, and serendipitously running into him at Orangeleaf in Manhattan, Kansas, last October.

If you haven’t seen Dr. Wesch’s recent video, “Rethinking Education,” you should definitely check it out. He created this to complement the new EduCause eBook, “The Tower and The Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing.” This video is a great update to his 2007 video, “The Machine is Us/ing Us”

I love this Tim O’Reilly quotation from the video:

The applications which matter today are harnessing collective intelligence.

This one is also great, but I’m not sure the source. It might be Yochai Benkler of the Berkman Center. In reference to WikiPedia and people favoring it today over the New York Times, he asks:

I don’t know about you, but as an educator, are you against discussions about the quality of knowledge?

That’s a beautifully constructed question.

Another great question in this video is:

Where are our students in all of this? [These radical, tectonic changes in the ways information is shared and communicated today.]

If your students aren’t blogging now, they need to be… and you need to be blogging with them! We all need to more frequently and intentionally engage in the practice of “talking with media.” How else are we going to learn to swim in the river of social media, unless we are not only willing but also regularly practice “getting wet” in that information river?

photo © 2007 Ed Garcia | more info (via: Wylio)

Michael Wesch’s videos and ideas push me in many of the same ways Clay Shirky and Larry Lessig do. His digital ethnography project, #VOST2011, was part of my personal inspiration to launch the 2011 Vision for Educational Leadership in 30 Seconds project.

I’m not the videographer Mike is, but I’m continually learning ideas and techniques for getting better from him and others! It’s great to have opportunities to not only be “virtually inspired” by others, but also hear those individuals share their ideas and passions face-to-face! Join us in a few weeks at the University of Central Oklahoma for the Heartland eLearning Conference and be inspired in person! 🙂

As a related footnote, I’m going to be sharing the opening plenary session at the event. It’s a vast understatement to say I’m intimidated knowing Dr. Wesch is following my comments up on March 8th. Clearly I need to “up my game” for this event. 🙂

Hat tip to James Walker and Richard Byrne for sharing the “Rethinking Education” video.

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conference, learning, oklahoma, uco, HeartlandConf10, midwest, 2011, mwesch, michael, wesch

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• Heartland eLearning Conference: 8-9 March 2010 – 2010
• Dan Pink and Clay Shirky: Online with Steve Hargadon – 2010
• Review of Ustream Producer by Dean Mantz – 2010
• Copyright for Educators SlideShare with Audio – 2009
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