FENI Day 2: The social network in motion

The second day of FENI I encouraged the conference attendees to make use of the tools I presented at the workshop to put Knowledge into Practice (tm), the KP motto. Condensing 2 hours worth of material down to 15 minutes was a challenge. Checking the tweets that morning, there were already a number of people using twitter the way it should have been at the conference, creating a dialogue about their experience online. I could follow those individuals as they post about how excited they were about the day, their reactions to the breakfast and then later about what they thought of the keynote speaker. It was amazing to be able to have that dialogue online and to see how people collectively thought about a given event and subject. Checking Facebook, I saw some comments there but it started showing its own after people attended classes and started posting pictures there.

I was really encouraged by the reactions I got the night before and that morning. I felt that this is an excellent start to an already amazing conference.
Some quotes I got and heard about the workshop “The World is Connected”

•  “You have broken down my social network barriers.”
•  “I love how you explain things in plain English.”
•  “Thank you! I got so much out of this.”
•  “I wish it was longer than 2 hours.”
•  “This workshop alone has paid for the entire weekend. “
•  “If this is what we are to expect for the rest of the conference... I can’t wait.”
•  “During the workshop I txt my students about using twitter and they responded in 45 seconds, all YES!”
•  “I can’t wait to take what I learned and try it out with my students.”
•  “Too much to learn! I need more time! Do it again!”
•  “I learned so many different ways to communicate with my students.”

I am so encouraged at this point, I couldn’t wait to see how this experiment would go.

The rest of the day at FENI proved to be a very fun day as I put into practice what I taught the attendees. I Tweeted, took pictures and posted on Facebook and wrote about my class on the wiki. I saw others doing the same and got to experience their classes throughout the day. It was such a fun experience. I couldn’t wait for to see how well the next day would go as I’m teaching one of the master classes, a three hour hands on class on using these social tools in their classroom. I am so excited that I could never predict what would happen the next day. Never in my wildest dreams would the day turn out the way it did. What a disaster!