Subheading: AKA Curating a Conference
In previous years, I have been blessed to have participated in attending the South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive conference in Austin. While some of my peers in ed tech continue to attend the SxSW Edu conference, I find more value in the Interactive part of the SxSW conference. SxSW kicks off each year with EDU, then Interactive, then Film, and then Music. The Interactive attendees come from a varied background including social media, gaming, journalism, business, non-profits, media, education, emerging technology, web design, interface design, and a large group of industry leaders.
So it isn't an "education" conference by any means. It is a conference for exploring what is going on in emerging technology across all these mediums in a way to allow attendees to interact more with each other and the panels presenting what is going on in these diverse fields.
For me, it is my GT conference experience because it broadens my knowledge base outside the edu field to see what is going on in the world outside of education in areas that affect business, industry, media, gaming, television, film, audience participation, and the diverse work force.
The conversations at SxSW Interactive now are conversations EDU starts years later.
I love going to conferences for two reasons: interaction with participants and sharing what I learn with an entire world of people across business, education, media, etc.
I have been blessed to be able to go to conferences for my field. I know that many districts cannot afford to send staff to conferences. Beyond conference fees, the travel and accommodation costs get exceedingly higher year by year. There are some in our field who are unable to get to the new information shared in closed-off conferences. So I enjoy sharing what I learn and giving away the experience to others who may never get to go.
Plus, my hope is more of the people in my field would choose to join me at the Interactive conference. I think there is extremely high value in attending conferences outside our field to see the overlap of similar obstacles and really varied responses in how to work around those obstacles. I don't recommend sending a group of teachers to it. I do recommend attending if you want to go outside the box and learn about emerging resources for all fields.
But this year, I couldn't afford the steep conference fee. The price tag has now reached the four digit price even at early registration. And since it isn't really an "edu" conference, I find it hard for persuading a district to fund that price point. In previous years, I paid out of my own pocket to attend and made it part of my Spring Break vacation.
So how do you attend a conference without attending? The key is in the #hashtag.
SxSW does something I wish other conferences would do (TCEA, TechForum, iPadpalooza). They pre-hashtag every session and note that in the conference book given out to attendees. The idea is that they know every hour you may have a few sessions you want to attend but physically you can only attend one. With predetermined hashtags, you can mark all sessions you want to attend, pick one, attend it, and then later search the hashtags to find information from the sessions you missed. Also, if you are attending a session, the predetermined hashtag is listed on the presenter's slides and on a name card at the front of the room.
Remember: the conference goal is interaction. So predetermining the hashtag of the session and inviting participation by hashtag for that session is what allows the audience to backchannel on their own as the session is going on.
Because of past attendance, I was hoping to get my hands on one of those conference books this year to go through and find the prescribed hashtags. However, this year, the SxSW Session list listed those hashtags on their online schedule listing so I had time to really research each session to build a schedule for all the sessions I was interested in. Below is a screen shot of a session with hashtags from the website.
So I opened a Google Drive document and started building my SxSW Interactive schedule for curating tweets by session. My initial list had 11 pages with 6-15 sessions per hour. This added up to 153 sessions spread across 5-days I planned to "attend".
I then researched using IFTTT recipes to automate curation of Tweets. I wanted a way to organize the pulling of Tweets into specific spreadsheets or notes by those hashtags. From the picture above, I established the recipe as a type of Boolean operator:
If Tweet search parameter contains #sxsw and/or #sxsw14 and/or #sxswi and/or #nasadesign, then..... subscribe to feed and post in correlating spreadsheet by term.
It worked....sort of not. I tried other similar types of recipes and feeds. In the end, I just took the time to search Twitter by hashtag to see how many tweets or RTs happened by each session. If there were more than 40, then they curated together in Storify as a news item. So my list of 153 became only 44. I did go through all 153 sessions to see what they offered but in the end only 44 had any notes of value to me or to those I share with.
Time consuming? Sure.
Worth the effort? Absolutely.
So my next few posts will be about what I learned from SxSW Interactive. Below is a list of sessions by theme. I won't blog on each session but will use the themes to share about what I learned.
Branding or Reaching Audience:
Privacy
iOT - Internet of Things
Conferencing
Workplace Climate
Brain Research
Multiscreening
Design
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