The CCA conference went fairly well—workshop participants seemed to get a lot out of the hands-on stuff we did (an introduction to blogs, podcasts, and social network sites) on Thursday, and we had a good discussion during Friday’s session (“Authenticity, Credibility and the Online Institution). Two major lessons learned:
- I really need to rehearse before presenting. Friday’s session got off to a rough start—including my embarkation on several tangents that didn’t really relate to the focus of the session—before contributions from Martha and good questions from the audience got us back on track. I’m not sure if it’s nervousness or a general inability to think on my feet, but I’m sure that practice will help.
- Now that I’m on the board, I need to shift from presenting to bringing in presenters more qualified than I. I’ve gotten to the point where I feel like I’m saying the same things at every conference, so it’s time to bring in some new perspectives. I’ll be doing a better job as a board member if I can concentrate on getting great speakers and putting together a comprehensive slate of web-related sessions for the membership.
The UMW folks (Martha, Andy and Seth) were amazing to work with during the conference. I wish I had more time to sit around and chat with them. Martha, I’d love to discuss the blog initiatives at our respective institutions. Andy, thanks for the invitation to UMW‘s Faculty Academy in the spring. (We also need to chat about Blur at greater length.) Seth, let me know what you end up using as your web-based calendar application.
The next order of CCA-related business is to start putting together the next version of the CCA site. I’m thinking about building it in Django, which means I need to do some more reading up on said framework. Might also be time to resume learning Python so I have a better understanding of what Django’s doing behind the scenes…
Well, I made it through the past two weeks. Starting today—after the time change augmented sleep, of course—I’m tackling all the stuff I have to do before Thanksgiving.
Comments
1
Rachel Tuesday, November 13, 2007 at 10:09 a.m.
I thought both of your presentations went well, and it can be hard to reign in open discussions when the topics are so subjective and "new," especially when everybody has so many questions. Thanks for sharing with us all! Everyone I talked to from Tech really enjoyed it.