My CSUWP colleague Megan Freeman and I are at the Colorado Language Arts Society Regional Spring Conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado this weekend.  (Man — lots of capital letters in that sentence!)
    We’ll be presenting a session tomorrow on blogging and podcasting.  You might remember that I wrote about planning a presentation on blogging in a location where there will be few computers and no Internet access.  We’ll be showing off some solid educational blogs, but I really hate presentations that are lecture-y.  I like to do stuff.
    So, we’ll be having our participants creating their own blogs using masking tape, paper, sticky notes and yarn.  Here’s the plan:
    When folks arrive, they’ll be asked to do some freewriting about a current concern or problem for them in their classrooms.  We’ll give them some scratch paper.  Then, we’ll forget entirely about the writing and go through a brief introduction of blogs, podcasts, and RSS.  Very, very brief.  In ten minutes, I’ve got to define those three things and share several examples.  Megan will spend some time talking about Internet safety and the work she’s been doing with her poetry club.    (Go and read some of their poems.  Really.)
    It’ll be tricky.
    Then, we’ll be "publishing" everyone’s writing from earlier using the walls and the masking tape.  Participants will have the chance to check out the session "aggregator" by walking around the room and responding to posts by commenting on them (via the sticky notes). 
    The yarn is the part I’m most worried about.  Ideally, if our hunch is right, we’ll begin to see patterns in the texts that show up.  Connections, if you will.  Some posts will be connected by topic.  Others will be connected by the commenters who make connections.  The yarn will go up on posts that have some sort of connection to each other.  I’m hoping that folks will actually begin to see, in a tangible way, the web of connections formed by what they write and think and comment.  We’ll debrief that at the end of our session.  (And I’ll have a camera on hand to document the whole thing.  We’ll record the session, too.  Might be podcast worthy.  Might not be.)
    What do you think?  You’ve still got about fifteen hours to talk me out of it.  If the whole thing crashes and burns, we can at least listen to some good podcasts. 
    If only I had thirty spare computers and a reliable hotel Internet connection.  I bet Will’s got Wi-Fi.   Oh well, we’ll settle (tomorrow) for our sticky notes and yarn.  #