My netvibes page is rapidly falling into disuse thanks to Twitter. I still have much love for all the feeds in my reader but it feels more lecture-like with people talking AT me. I understand that there is a masked asymmetry involved in Twitter but it just feels like a great rolling conversation in the hallway of this awesome conference where everybody interesting just happens to be chatting it up. So before I head to IITSEC, I wanted to pass along a few of the tidbits I've picked up in the hallway.  BigTweet: A way to post to your Twitter feed from any Web page. You can post sequenced Tweets so that you can send out 280 characters at a time. I want to play with this but as with alot of these tools/services, I find myself pausing to ask ' how loose do I want to be with my Twitter credentials'?Block Posters: I may have mentioned this one already but you upload an image, tell it was size paper you have in your printer and how big you want the image to be and presto...you get a PDF that you print out and make a wall-size poster from. Nifty. Found it through Twitter of course.TweetGrid: Set up your grid (up to a 3x3), enter your search terms and watch the grid magically update as TweetGrid scans the Twitterverse. This is a nice Web site but I think someone on Twitter said it best when they said "it wants to be an Air app." Tweetsgiving: Here is a great social media success story. This site, created by Epic Change, managed to raise $10,000 in 48 hours from 336 contributors using nothing but social media. The money will go to fund a new classroom for a school in Tanzania. People Browsr: Twitter is like this ridiculously deep trove of social interaction. People Browsr is one of those tools that begins to peel back some of the layers of that onion. You get a similar feel from Tweet Deck's multiple column view but People Browsr allows you mix in feed from all your online networks. Dizzying really. Who to follow?: Now a great place to start that I've mentioned before, is Jane Hart's Directory of Learning Professionals on Twitter. Another collection of lists that I am currently plowing through is this growing set of niche Top Tens from Darren Rowse at ProBlogger. I am also following Mr Tweet, who seems to aimed at helping people expose folks they should follow. edmodo: Just like Yammer is an attempt to take Twitter (aka microblogging) inside the corporate firewall, edmodo seems to be aiming at the teacher/class market. Stowe Boyd has a great post outlining his initial survey of this as a tool which allows teachers to set up private networks for their classes, and send each other files, notes, etc. This one will bear watching. Best Online Learning Games-2008: This is from Larry Ferlazzo and while it has nothing to do with Twitter per se, that is how I found it. The same goes for these last two items: FeedVis: Top 50 Edublogs and Show/World. Jason Priem put together this great visualiztion tool for looking deeper into the posts from the Top 50 EduBlogs. As Jason so eloquently puts it "It's an animated tagcloud that lets you compare word frequencies accross different time periods and authors, then check out the posts that used the words." The coolest thing though is that Jason put the code for feedvis up for download and all it takes to parse another OPML file, is to change one line of code. Finally, we'll close with Show/World. Click through the available maps to see the world change in proportion to the population, the percent of broadband penetarion, the rate of infant mortality and illiteracy. Not always comfortable but always revealing.

So I'm back from IITSEC and I'm starting to dig through all the backlog of stuff (emails, Tweets, etc) but I did want to post something about this conference since it is a unique experience for me. The unique aspect is that usually I post a lot of stuff from the conferences I attend/present at but not this one. Why?'IITSEC is different' seems to be a woefully inadequate description. How is it different? First - its huge. Attendance is usually 15,000 to 20,000 and doesn't really seem to take a hit during tough economic times. Secondly, it really does cover an entire industry - there is no corollary conference on the corporate side, not DevLearn, Annual Gathering, ASTD ICE or TeK Knowledge,  or ISPI, SALT...none of those conferences even come close to as complete coverage of an industry as IITSEC does - it just has no competition. So if you work in training, simulation or education in the defense industry, for this one week, just about everyone you know or need to work with is at IITSEC. Third, it is overtly and openly commercial and about getting business done. There are paper sessions at IITSEC but while important for the authors to get their papers accepted - the presentations are only 20 mintutes long and all the papers are published on a CD that comes in your bag so physical attendance at the paper sessions is not the heart of IITSEC. The heart of IITSEC is the expo floor and customers come to IITSEC and to the expo looking for solutions and looking to make connections and do deals at a level that I just don't see at other conferences. Fourth, while the fine folks who plan and execute  IITSEC do provide a wifi hotspot (thx ADM Lewis and Barabara), the cheap bastards who run the Orange County Convention Center want to charge me $25 for a freaking day of 'net access! Tar and feather! Draw and quarter! So bad connectivity equals less posts/tweets coming out.Fifth, because it covers a domain so fully...everybody is there and once you've gone a few times (I think this was my 9th time) and I had the dumb luck to come in to DOD at the top of the pyramid - so I met a lot of people - now, IITSEC is very much an 'old home week' for me. This isn't a purely social exercise though. With about 3.5 million people and a half a trillion dollar a year budget, turns out that DOD is actually a fairly tight circle to work in. So IITSEC really has this incredible value WRT reconnecting with people who are in new jobs, looking of new jobs, starting cool projects, etc etc. Plus you have this vibe about the revolving door between consulting and government that is full effect at IITSEC as military folk or govt folk look to move into the private sector and some from the other side (a much smaller number) look to head into the Fed. ...and don't forget the technology. Nowhere else will you find the kind of displays you'll find at IITSEC. The latest in large-scale (try 270 degrees by about 15 feet high) displays, the latest weapons training platforms (from infantry squad level to flying the new F-35) to a whole truckload of exhibitors selling everything from e-learning tools and systems to cargo helicopter training packages. So its a huge face-to-face social network opp, an insane tech expo, the world's largest and longest business lunch +parties +old friends +a chance to 'publish' ....that is how IITSEC is different. Phew.

So I asked my Twitterverse this question and have been getting a few responses:What's your best guess at conference attendance numbers?I just came back from I/ITSEC and the estimate I got there was something around ~18,000 attendees. This number probably includes paying attendees, guests, and exhibitors but is still a darn healthy number. I've also heard that Game Developer's Conference draws about 18K but with fewer exhibitors (I can testify to that  - aside from E3 back in the day, I haven't seen an expo floor like IITSEC [but then I haven't been to CES]).My own thinking is that conferences in the learning/training field osciallate somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000. Just wondering if folks have any other guesses as to the attendance levels at learning/training conferences, gaming conferences [to include the Virtual Worlds events] (thx Kurt for the reminder that GLS is capped at 400), tech conferences like Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, etc...Thanks!Updates:One report is that Le Web has something like ~1700 folks

FeedVis..An Interactive Tag Cloud for Your Feeds A little while back, I posted about how Jason Priem had done a great job creating this exploratory tool but how he had also included the code for people to download and make use of. Well the code is still available but Jason has gone one better and set up a form that allows folks to just upload their own OPML file right there. This was cool but now I guess it would be ++good. 

....I put Google's Friend Connect on my front page and as of now I have 2 members! That is weak. Help a guy out. Stop by the site and sign up! C'mon! Spirit of the holidays and all that....

That's me, that's Tim O'Reilly and that's Mark Sylvester, CEO of introNetworks. Below, that me looking like I'm arguing with Tim O'Reilly...I wasn't I swear....(and huge thanks to Jay Cross for taking the shots!)

So back on December 5, Will Richardson posted about his thoughts on  Microsoft's School of the Future Summit. I was struck by Will's lament over how quickly he lost any sense that there was a coherent vision of the future of schools in any of the speakers' comments. This got me thinking back to what I still think is one of the most under-reported speeches on education - Bill Gates' address  (PDF link) to the National Governor's Association back in 2005. Don't remember it? That's the one where he made the little comment that "America's high schools are obsolete."Nice right? The richest man in the world and the head of the world's largest philanthropic endowment went on to say:"By obsolete, I don't just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded- though a case could be made for every one of those points.By obsolete, I mean that our high schools - even when they're working exactly asdesigned - cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teachkids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It's the wrong tool for thetimes"So how do these two things tie up? First its a bit ironic to hear Will's lament about a lack of a common vision from a Microsoft summit when 3 years earlier, the former CEO of that same corporation offered a pretty clear vision about how to start the re-design process he felt was needed to change the American educational system. Agree or disagree with his vision but it could've well served as a springboard for a coherent set of discussions at this 2008 Summit. Second, I think Gates' had it partially right when he said that the problem couldn't be solved by starting within the schools themselves but had to begin with having the political will to change. IMHO, with a problem this size, I think we have to get past the idea of incremental, evolutionary change. I think especially with problems of this magnitude - we need REVOLUTIONARY change. There are some many tendrils of the current education system that extend into so many areas, that it seems that incremental change is doomed to failure - piecemeal change efforts just can't seem to gain enough momentum before they are ground to a halt by the forces of the status quo. This, I think requires an effort on the scale being discussed regarding the upgrading and repair of America's physical infrastructure. We need to envision a similarly broad initiative aimed at re-designing  our national educational system.

So I was looking at XMind - mind mapping app - and it looks good and all but especially considering the air-tight lockdown on desktops across the federal government, I really can't even look twice at something that requires an install. I mean AIR is probably years away from approval. I did want to pass along WorldMapper. This site has some incredible visualizations. The one on the left is the proportionate world based on the presence of personal computers. The thing that gets me about visualizations like this is that I wonder what they might reveal about our organizations if we could view them through lens like this. What would your departments look like if they were sized by satisfaction with your training?Now as soon as I say that about not being able to install products, I find Balsamiq Mockups. Their products allow you to create software mockups easily and quickly. Now why would I like to have a closer look given what I said earlier about not being able to install products? Because they offer integration with products that may already be behind the firewall - Confluence and XWiki. Nice move - building integration w/ existing enterprise products - especially KM ones. Learning/training departments looking to sneak in 2.0 capabilities under the radar should hook up with their KM teams and see what already may be inside the 'wall.So a couple more tools...EtherPad. This one is dead simple. REAL real-time editing of text on the same web page. That's it.Its clean and simple and that is what works about it. Lets hope they don't fall prey to 'feature creep' and start loading down the site w/ more & more features. The last two tools are a bit more complex but offer some interesting options for building content.Flowgram - If you've tried to use MSFT's Producer to marry up PPT with audio, notes, etc....then stop. Just stop. You can create 'flows' of web pages, photos, etc (great review here). One problem already noted is that learners can easily jump out of your 'flow' since all the HTML resources (links, etc) are live. This is maybe a less intimidating version of some of the functionality embedded in VoiceThread (below).Voice Thread - Imagine you want to show a short video to your online class and gather their reactions. You set up an account at VoiceThread and upload your video, or your pictures, and then either share the link or embed the video in your site. Now your students can add voice comments via a phone, upload an audio file, capture a video response using a Web cam or simply add a text comment. Did I mention the "doodle" feature that lets you draw on top of the media? Oh wait, what about the ability to export your VoiceThread to something like say an iPod? Nifty huh? Better idea....ask your your content authoring vendor when they'll have this functionality available!

From the book's site: "The Self-Organizing Revolution explores the transition from the modern institution of mass schooling to a postmodern network of diverse learning options available to all young people. Miller wrestles with the philosophical, moral, and political questions that arise with the radical proposition that public schooling as we know it has become obsolete. He cautions against simplistic models of privatization and lays out an egalitarian, democratic, socially responsible program of decentralized education."Has anyone read this? Care to offer comments? Couldn't find anything on Amazon