Reflections on Northern Voice 09

Notes from the Northern Voice: Personal blogging and Social Media Conference

I considered writing several blog posts to express my Northern Voice 09 experience and then thought that perhaps I should just jot down a few point form notes while things remain fresh in my mind.

It is possible to own too many moose. Meese?

The audience gave as good as it got. People from all walks of life attended which was a very stimulating experience for one used to attending only education conferences.



Moose Wrangling is organized chaos, and very entertaining.
Photo by http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/3297212554/sizes/m/

Remixing other people’s work, mashups, will become more mainstream
– James Chutter

Most people access the Internet through their phones.



Rob Cottingham is hilarious. Live blogger Rebecca Bollwit captured some of his keynote in a blog post. While Nancy White sketched his presentation.
Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/choconancy/3299028482/sizes/m/

Consumer to consumer influence is the most valuable.
Learning to sift through the mountains of information online and finding what is relevant to you is an emerging online survival skill. – Nate Elliott

If you’re thinking of joining Twitter choose a really short I.D. so people won’t curse you went they want to respond or retweet. Fewer chararcters = better.

Use Hootsuite to schedule posts to Twitter. This can be effective when you want to heckle yourself during a presentation by projecting Twitter comments on the big screen behind you a la Rob Cottingham.

If you want engage your organization in using social media develop guidelines based on company policies and engage all stakeholders in drawing up those guidelines.

It is irresponsible to have the shift and return keys situated beside each other on the keyboard. Consequence: several unfinished tweets which made no sense escaped my keyboard before I was ready.

If you are blogging about your community be a Greek chorus. Have your students blog about their community: school, home, team, province, country.
“Build a community identity – reveal the character of a place, represent diverse perspectives, keep the focus narrow, aggregate local information, build relationships, draw in other stakeholders. Find what’s new and interesting, extend traditional news coverage (example elections).
Reveal opinions and perspectives that are missed in mainstream coverage.”
- Briana Tomkinson. Read Briana's blog Tenth to the Fraser about her home town of New Westminster.

For our students, blogging is work experience.

Rather than isolating yourself in online communities, bring back the rich resources you find to enhance your experiences with friends, family, colleagues in your day-to-day lives.

Change only happens at the edge of chaos - Barbara Ganley

Alan Levine, aka Cogdog, introduced us to 5 card stories and here is my own attempt.

A few guidelines for bloggers from David Eaves:
- Always thank commenters
- Remember that when you write you are modeling.
- Consider writing a few guidelines for your commenters to follow: what you expect from them.

I know there was so much more but my mind is still whirling and I must move on to other things. I hope this has given a small sense of the wonderfulness that is Northern Voice.