Prompt #2: Conferences for Professional Learning!

I love attending conferences when I have the opportunity to do so, and my personal favorite – the one I attend most regularly is the Online Teaching Conference every June. I’m sure this #cccwrite group has heard of it. 🙂 To me, conferences give me a chance to network with colleagues, catch-up with friends, and spark some new ideas for my practice. With the OTC especially, I love being surrounded by colleagues who believe in the potential of online learning, and I find myself enjoying that buzz of excitement.

Two years ago at OTC, I had someone come up to me and thank me for my presentation from the year before that. He told me that he’d brought back my presentation info to his campus, and he was using it to support his colleagues with smartphone video recording. I didn’t know what to say. Sure, it was cool that my presentation had been meaningful to him, but even cooler knowing that he’d brought it back to his campus, and it was benefiting his colleagues who hadn’t attended the conference! Yay for that!

It was a really good reminder to me of the potential impact that conference presentations can have if:

1. We put our conference materials online, and
2. We make an effort to share what we learn at our home campus

When we got back from OTC17 last year, Leslie, Donna, and I recorded our Top Ten Takeaways from OTC17 video and we emailed that out to our campus email DL to share it with folks. We recorded that on Zoom, and it was a fun way to bring our learning together and share out to the community at the same time. I love that that Mesa participants of the NCORE conference are asked to present as part of the “Bringing NCORE back” workshop series during the following academic year. I think that’s a great way to share what’s learned and to bring the conversations onto your local campus. See our @PrezPam’s #CCCWrite post for more on #NCORE.

I must also mention here too, that I also just love following the backchannel of conference hashtags on Twitter. It was really when I went to conferences that I started loving Twitter the most. It was like this extra layer of conversation and info that was getting shared amongst participants. When my kids were little, travel was way more difficult for me, so following conference hashtags on Twitter became an awesome way of adulting, virtually!  Every once in while I’d catch a nugget of awesomeness on the conference hashtag, and so began my love of Twitter. 

So the more colleagues we can get onto Twitter, and the more conference-sharing we do on Twitter, the greater the impact that our conferences can have.  #dillydilly