A meeting of the minds

Many, many, many thanks to the awesome folks at the Discovery Educator Network for bringing together a super group of educators from around Florida and the nation this evening in Orlando for dinner. I was glad to see and visit with Tim Wilson (The Savvy Technologist) again (who I met last summer thanks to Apple):

It was also great to meet and talk at length with Will Richardson, whose blog and ideas I’ve been reading for a couple of years. Will was the first edublogger I ever heard about and read… and I would say he has had more influence on the ideas of other educators around the globe about blogging than anyone:

These photos are not the greatest, as they were taken with my cell phone– thankfully several others had better cameras and are going to share those images later, so maybe I’ll replace these on my Flickr account with the better versions when I get them. Dean Shareski also joined us, along with Steve Dembo.

Many thanks also to eSchoolNews for organizing a blog awards contest (PDF) which brought Bill MacKenty, Frank Labanca, Sara Mead and I together for a very nice luncheon and ceremony as part of FETC 2006. Unfortunately my iPod was switched off during our 20 minute or so roundtable discussion led by Steve Dembo (now with the Discovery Education Network), but the dialog was videotaped so hopefully I’ll get a copy of that down the road. If so I’ll share it as a podcast. Really great to meet Bill, Frank and Sara and talk about how blogs have impacted us and are transforming education. Andrew Rotherham, who is Sara’s blog partner on EduWonk, was with his wife as she was giving birth to twins today! And thanks to Andy’s blog post earlier today, I am glad to hear everyone is healthy and happy– and their family has two new baby girls!

There are many thoughts in my head following this wonderful day of face to face conversations and dialog with educators– not just those mentioned above, but also Florida educators like Christine who are learning about web 2.0 and its tools for enabling conversations for the first time thanks to the DEN. I’m sure I’ll reflect and share about these ideas more in the weeks to come. What a great experience to share a meal and some great conversation. This evening answers (at least in part) the question Mark Ahlness and others have raised concerning how we share “the new story” with other teachers not presently connected to the blogosphere. Events like tonight, thanks to Discovery, provide literal invitations to other educators to join the conversation.