I have to wonder though if the attendees for Shadow Con were truly representative of the overall attendees at the conference. The way I first heard of the session was through twitter–I don’t know that it would have really stuck out at me if I were just browsing through the listings on the NCTM website or conference booklet. If others were like me and learned about it through twitter, there may have been a disproportionate number of twitter users at the session to start with which would explain why so many chose to tweet about the session after the conference.

I appreciate the thorough analysis–I’ve recently joined the board of my local affiliate and it definitely gives me a lot to think about for our future conferences.

I actually don’t like a lot of Twitter’s constraints. One of them is that it filters out many posts with hyperlinks, so your helpful tweet may not show up in a hashtag feeds. I always run into this at conferences, where I know of something helpful to share, but my tweet never appears in the live feed. I usually end up just tweeting it @ the presenter. It’s a bit undemocratic, and it kind of defeats the purpose of collaborative tweets for a conference.

Still, there is great benefit and low cost to adding twitter feeds to a website. Maybe scrap the idea of using the feed to replace the comments section.

While true that some will be transformed by something as brief as a tweet, it is more true that an ongoing conversation and then a cycle of posing, applying, reflecting, reposing, reapply, re-searching will be more likely to change practice.

Chester Draws:

The problem with Twitter is that it’s brevity makes it quite hard to give extended thinking, you are just getting going when you run out of

Just to clarify: this proposal doesn’t depend on Twitter. Like Chester, I tend to prefer the space constraints and the conversational pace of blogs. That’s why we were a bit blindsided to find out that, no, to the extent people wanted to talk about the Shadow Con sessions, they wanted to do that on Twitter.

So Joseph’s recommendation seems promising to me:

I’d say you can integrate the twitter conversation into each talk’s website by adding in a live twitter feed for that talk’s distinct hashtag.

I’m obliged also to Elham, Elaine, and Marilyn (quoted below) for articulating their purposes for attending conferences.

I agree with Elham’s comment about her expectations for what conferences can do and what is important to build locally. I don’t expect an NCTM conference to provide in-depth professional development, but act more like a booster shot for my own learning.

I wouldn’t want to place an effort like Shadow Con on the same par as continuous, site-based PD like Elham describes. (It will mostly suffer by comparison.) Or to suggest that there is a right way to participate in conferences, and it’s the Shadow Con way.

But if a participant wants more than a booster shot from her NCTM experience and she wants to follow-up on ideas from the conference, NCTM has a vacuum where they could have a centralized forum. Shadow Con has me wondering if a centralized forum is the wrong premise, though, if our ad hoc networks of blogs, tweets, and emails are sufficient.

Pierre Tranchemontagne:

The idea being that presentations (keynote, regular, etc.) is the upload of information and the download session would allow participants to talk, question, propose, reflect, and connect ideas by talking with other participants. No presentation.

Hi Pierre, I’m wondering if you attended any of the networking sessions at NCTM and if that captures the value you’re seeking. (Love the upload / download metaphor, also.)

Tammy Dunn:

Is it possible to have access to the link to ShadowCon?

Sure thing.

I am not young, but I’m far from tech unfriendly. I run a couple of web-sites, have tried a blog etc. But Twitter just doesn’t give me any intellectual stimulus, except as a means of directing me to more reflective resources.

I also like to set quiet time aside to do some reading of blogs, research etc to further my teaching. The immediacy of Twitter is not a bonus when the information you seek takes time to quietly digest.

(1) Two reasons why I go: I learn from sessions, both from sessions that inspire me and sessions that disappoint or even disturb me. The sessions that inspire me generally confirm my beliefs and practices and extend them in some way. I leave with new tools. The sessions that disappoint or disturb push me to think more deeply about what I do and why. The other reason is that I connect with people face-to-face, including some people I only see once a year at the annual NCTM and others who I meet for the first time.

(2) Just as I believe that writing is how I work my way into a subject and make it my own (to paraphrase William Zinsser in Writing to Learn), preparing for a talk gives me the same opportunity. It requires me to think about what I’ve learned in the previous year, choose what’s most important, and decide how to communicate. I hope that attendees either will be supported by hearing a talk that confirms and extends their thinking, or will be disappointed or disturbed that think more deeply about their beliefs and practices.

I agree with Elham’s comment about her expectations for what conferences can do and what is important to build locally. I don’t expect an NCTM conference to provide in-depth professional development, but act more like a booster shot for my own learning. I admire the effort of Shadow Con, and I enjoyed watching all of the videos of those sessions–they gave me a helpful context for their Blog and Twitter posts. And I applaud your efforts to search for ways to make the conference experience more widely available.