There was a lot to be learned from the Learning Technologies conference (eg. Colin Warren’s excellent summary), however my favourite learning came from the momentum and connectedness of the overall conference.  Nancy White in her talk quoted Mike Sefang (@fang on twitter) that the the difference between a network and a community is that with a community you notice when someone is missing.  This conference goes beyond being a learning and networking event to the feel and depth of creating real community.

The Learning Technologies conference highlights a particular challenge, in common with many ed tech conferences though more extreme here, of how to cater to both advanced practitioners and beginners at the same time; and how to get them mixing with each other. This year everyone was aware of twitter (when the audience was asked – compared with about 20% last year) and many joined and started during the conference.  (Conferences are a wonderful place to start twittering as there is plenty of active support immediately available.)  As well there were many social activities (in addition to the usual cocktail party and dinner) which created context for meeting new people beyond our established network groups.  These activities included

• a teams based pirate activity,
• byo conference bag  (with prizes for the best decorated, most travelled and most environmentally friendly - and what a relief and benefit to the environment that someone organising a conference finally thought of this idea) ,
• portmanteau word spotting (joined words like hashtag or mashup and a few new ones like frankengoogle),
• flipumentary competition (conference documentaries of 30 seconds developed on flip cameras handed out to participants).

In particular the seemingly superficial pirate activity involved interacting with the conference posterous site where information had to be sought about group allocation, as well as specific activities (such as interviewing a speaker or being photographed at the local wifi café) posted.  This created both extensive face to face interaction opportunities as well as creative activity on twitter, and through posting of photos and videos on posterous (amongst other places).

While it was great fun, the great thing about this was the modeling of the conference in what we can do with students,

• introducing a new tool (posterous)
• how they can use the back channel (twitter),
• how we can incorporate bringing in both guest speakers  and other learners from outside via the various virtual classroom/video conferencing tools on offer
• and network via twitter and other tools like cover-it-live with those who can’t attend.

In addition there was a conference Ning so that networking and idea generation can happen in advance, where a group collaborated to set up a conference google-wave to experiment with for the conference.   Learning technologies is a leading example of how a conference transforms and improves through clever use of new tools.  Then there’s the beachside accommodation, beautiful venue at Sunshine coast TAFE, excellent catering…I could go on!