Yesterday, I posted some of my preliminary reflections on EduBloggerCon 2009. Those reflections were posted just before I went to an outstanding conversation session hosted by Jeff Utecht. The conversation was started with the questions “Is blogging dead or dying?” and “Where does Twitter fit in?” The conversation included topics such as real-time search (my two cent contribution), Jeff’s idea that Twitter makes the life-cycle of a conversation shorter, how to get people started and interested in blogging/ Twitter/ FriendFeed. I believe it was Scott McLeod who brought the conversation back to the “trenches” so to speak when he said something to the effect of “for most educators, posting on the web is still a new thing.” He put this comment in the context of his Castle book club in which he has members who are reluctant to post a comment to an online group for which they signed up.

Scott’s point reminded us all that it is easy to get caught up in the pageviews, retweets, and other statistics of blogging, but there is still a huge population of people that doesn’t know what is going on in the world of educational technology. The challenge then is to answer the question, “how do we get teachers interested in staying current in best practice technology integration?” My simple answer to this to show teachers some specific tools that can help them engage students in their classrooms. And when they ask, “how do you find all this?” (and they always do ask me) show a couple of blogs like Larry Ferlazzo’s and introduce them to RSS readers.

Jeff Utecht (on left) and David Warlick during the conversation about the future of edublogging.

A couple of people have asked me where I’m posting notes and links from NECC 2009. I set up a Drop.io page for my notes and links from this trip. You can find that Drop here. I have also set up a Friend Feed group for conversations about NECC 09. You can find and join that group here.