Ruminate

What timing– just a few days after making it an integral part of my portion of the Mashup for Non-Programmer’s workshop, during which I mentioned the long wait I have endured for features I’d heard were coming almost a year ago, Ning has rolled out their new version. The site’s a bit loaded at the moment, but from the looks of things there is some compelling new features, including more granularity and choice in the built-in services and layouts.

I suspect that most of my fellow Northern Voice speakers are as tired– or more– than I am. So I hope we get a blanket pass for not yet blogging more in the aftermath of Northern Voice. I’m trapped in the airport here for five more hours, but I have another presentation to finish preparing for, so it has to wait.

Northern Voice was a fantastic event that I can’t recommend highly enough. I know some people looked at the informal, laid-back nature of NV and assumed it was lightweight, but it’s really the kind of (un)conference that will give back as much as you want to put into it. Needless to say, the “networking” opportunities are endless (I hate to use the term networking because it sounds so business-like and clinical when the reality is so much warmer and rewarding… let’s say that the opportunities to connect were endless.

I learned a lot. I think I had a mini-breakthrough in the model I have been developing regarding education, social software, technological change, and learning communities. I met an astonishing number of accomplished and interesting people. I finally got to work with a number of people that have influenced my thinking and met many more who will do so in the future. I met some real friends, not just like-minded colleagues. And Vancouver is a great city. Despite their funny looking bills, two-dollar coins, and the whole rational metric system thing, I would have no problem spending a lot more time in Canada. Hard to imagine how the whole weekend could have been much better.

So far Northern Voice has exceeded my expectations. Every session I’ve attended has been worthwhile, and both the Moose Camp mashup session and today’s Social Software for Education panel were standing room only. I have more to say on both of those (and a lot of other things), but not a lot of time to write until tonight.

What I love about NV is that so many people here are passionate about what they are doing. Although most of the attendees at the education panel were associated with educational institutions (which surprised me), most people I talk to are bloggers first. They believe in the power of blogging as an act of self-expression and as a life-changing force for themselves and others. That passion and enthusiasm can be contagious… and has been!

While we are here celebrating blogging and its power, let’s not forget either our fortune in being able to say what we like or those who are paying a price for speaking out.

Islam does have more than its fair share of violent activists and terrorists, Hosni Mubarak is a tool, and Egypt is– despite being an ally– showing itself as a backward nation. No one should be in jail for saying it.

Jason Toal whipped this flyer up (amongst a few others). Check it out full size.

I love it when a plan comes together…

Opening night dinner was a crowded affair in the Heritage Hall. It’s more than a little ironic to be almost voiceless at the Northern Voice conference, but Scott was kind enough to introduce me to a few people and I met many others in the guise of a man with few, hoarse words.

At our table were myself, Scott, Eve Maler a Technology Director at Sun and one of the creators of XML, Dave Shea of Mezzoblue and the CSS Zen Garden, Tim Bray who most people probably know as a creator of XML and Atom, his wife Lauren also a senior Tech person at Sun who deftly managed children and Aussie-tinged conversation, and Michael Stewart with ITS at BCIT. Dinner, cooked by a group of volunteers, was (to be technical) yummy. Bowtie pasta with sausage and red sauce, baby potatoes, salmon, a real salad, and even a chocolate fountain…

After dinner, Lee LeFever of Common Craft put on an entertaining presentation about a trip he and his wife took around the world, blogging the whole way. Lee was very funny, punctuating his pictures (of which he took 14,000 during the trip) with amusing anecdotes and heart-felt stories of the way their travel blog became not only an element of change for themselves, but a force for change for the people and places they visited. His finale were a few snippets of video, including a few funny clips that reminded me of Steve, Don’t Eat That but with live action documentation.

All in all a good night despite not being physically able to talk much. It’s a fantastic feeling to be in a group of people who are gathered for the love of blogging, citizen journalism, storytelling and self-expression. I spend so much time focused on a few small aspects of what blogging is really all about; it is too easy to forget the very human and individual motivations that must be engaged to make it work. I rationally know this to be true– thus my focus on learning communities and Third Spaces where these activities are fostered beyond the “merely” academic– but it is different to feel it from others. In many ways Northern Voice, so far, reminds me of a writing conference… a geeky writing conference where it’s not shameful to be a poet or storyteller, but also not a bad thing to know about microformats, content management and pimping one’s blog.

[note to self: must talk to Lee and see if they have an recordings of a presentation like the one he did tonight-- it would be very valuable for students learning about blogging to see]

No time to comment much on them now, but the daily aggregator skimming revealed a fascinating pair of articles and comments. First, Bryan Alexander on the possibility of Third Life, or a federated metaverse. Then Gardner’s reaction… and the comments on both posts show a lot of insight.

For my part, though I am skeptical about many of the claims made about Second Life and feel it has a narrow (but interesting) potential for educational application, I have no doubt whatsoever that a ubiquitous metaverse of some kind is on the horizon, first as a much more expansive second place and eventually as a tech-mediated environment that one could be in (or in touch with) all the time, ala Vinge, Stephenson, etc. That I can believe that while at the same time bemoaning even the simplest interoperability between most current web services just goes to show you how contradictory I am. But so was Whitman, and he did OK!

The flu refuses to give in completely and sometimes I literally have no voice (and when I do I sound, to myself at least, like a cartoon character), but I am off to Vancouver, B.C. for Northern Voice 2007. I just can’t pass up the opportunity to meet and learn from so many great people, including quite a number who have been extremely influential on my thinking and career. Unlike most other conferences, NV seems to be as much about good old fashioned personal networking and discussion as presentations. I’ve had the privilege of attending quite a few different conferences and hearing from luminaries of every stripe– and occasionally even getting to spend a few minutes with them– but the chance for real discussion is usually rare.

And sometimes it’s just nice to have a chance to be “in the fold” with others who labor in the same areas and share so much background. The O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference has a similar comfortable feeling of being someplace I belong, but the lack of people involved in education, humanities, social sciences and citizen journalism is hard to deal with. NV appears to feature the best of all these worlds– the stellar attendee and speaker list of a “big” conference with the social and learning opportunities of an un-conference filled with my peers and mentors.

I hope bad things don’t really come in threes, because:

1) Yesterday the flu/cold/bronchitis/tuberculosis/consumption or whatever it is finally broke through my defenses leaving me as sick as a dog.

2) Last night an automatic windows update was applied, got hung up when it should have been finished/rebooting and after restarting half of my folders are gone including my entire documents directory leaving me with nothing since my last backup about ten days ago.

I don’t know if I can take the third, whatever it might be!