I want to call out educators to try and actively promote a Plus 1 policy when registering for conferences this year. Most of us attend conferences that we feel comfortable in, conferences where we are supported by other like minded individuals, conferences that allow us to take part in conversations we feel pretty knowledgeable in. This was especially true at NECC 2008, and its true in the online conference I am actively participating in right now.
While I was in the backchannel chat today, I thought “wow, everyone in here is ahead of the curve and is pretty sold on what this conference is promoting,” which happened to be Web 2.0 tools. The theme of the conference isn’t the point, but the fact that we were all chatting away in a gigantic Echo Chamber started to bother me. There wasn’t anyone on that chat that was disagreeing with anything that was being said, even when prompted to.
The point is, most of us really want to change education. We aren’t going to do that until we get more teachers, administrators, district personnel, lawmakers, and politicians involved. To do that, we should invite them places. Get them to witness what we are trying to do. Get them to argue with us and make us justify why we are changing education in this particular vision.
So, for all the conferences we are planning on going to this upcoming year, let’s either make sure we bring a person that doesn’t agree with us or might not understand what we are doing, or if money is an issue, have them REPLACE us at that conference. You know they will get more out of it anyway.
This will take some work. We will have to be unselfish, almost altruistic in some cases. In other cases we will have to work hard to convince colleagues they should attend and will have to hound them to say yes when they don’t want to work over the summer or write extra lesson plans for a sub. Whatever it takes. This is easy in the scheme of changing education!
Conferences in the next year that I really want to go to and will make PLUS 1 a reality in: K12 Online Conference, Virtual Schools Symposium, Educon 2.1, NCCE 2009 , and NECC 2009
