Yesterday, late afternoon, I was working (watching a video) at my desk (dining room table) with half an eye on Twitter.  A tweet came up from Kelly Dumont who, in the relativity of a global social network actually lives fairly close to me.

Instantly my ears perked up and my eyes widened.  I started thinking, wow, thats the closest any of my Twitter friends have been to my little neck of the woods (St. George is a beautiful little town in Southern Utah which is only about 2 hours from me).  So I tweeted back:

My comment obviously wasn’t one of my intellectually shining moments because Kelly said right back:

When I made the previous comment, I hadn’t been thinking about meeting Kelly at NECC, only about seeing a Twitter friend near Vegas, and I never saw Kelly when he visited my campus last school year (but had heard the story so still should of known better .  So, I responded in my normal sarcastic way that also acknowledges I had obviously said something foolish:

From there the joking took a turn, and this is where a Twitter conversation turned into a life experience that I will appreciate for a long time:

I checked out the site he linked me to and saw he was presenting about using social networking tools in school at a conference that caters to student and faculty tech leaders in K-12 schools throughout Utah.  I quickly thought about what the next day held, and since I was working on projects that could be put off an extra day I said:

From that point, we figured out the logistics through a series of more tweets and in a little more than 12 hours from the beginning of the conversation I left Las Vegas for St. George.  I arrived about 20 minutes before the presentation began, said hi, quickly outlined what we were going to be talking about, and ended up co-presenting at a 3 hour workshop this morning with Mr. Dumont.

I had no idea Kelly was going to be in St.George before he posted that first tweet so to be able to go from joking around on Twitter to presenting at a conference in less than 16 hours was quite an experience.  Kelly and I don’t have each others phone numbers, we have never emailed, we have never Skyped, but we were able to seed and grow an idea in a matter of minutes that brought us together at a place to teach.  A power of Twitter.

-elgg is a possibilty open source program

- walled garden vs. not, what are the benefits of each?

-  @coolcatteacher – do no start out on open space, teach them in safe space first then move towards public forums when they get etiquette down.

- a lot of people running cover it live, tried to get but FF3 isn’t compatible it seems, budtheteacher told me try it anyway but out of time for this session.

-  How much social web about pedagogical model or creating global citizenship?  Both, but more about education benefit for me since trying to get at-risk kids through hs

- using summize.com to follow even more twitterers who I dont normally follow

- students self-regulating in one example, 300 posts but 3000 comments in a blog project one ran on Ning network and kids self-regulated

-  kids that never talked f2f, was one of smartest kids in class and only did teacher find that out when they got a chat forum going

-look up fishbowl w/ live blogging

- backchannel in classroom is not threatening for f2f

- places to mentor, to teach etiquette cuz have grown up in Wild Wild West @kevinhoneycutt

- kids mentoring kids,

-  why are we zero tolerant with digital when not in analog, kids get in a fight at recess would we close recess.

-  think of everything as learning opportunity

- kids learning how to use these tools in personal lives while teachers learned in professional lives @khokanson says. Rings true, so we need to use these to teach professional behavior.

-Hate my method of liveblogging, need to write next session up a littel different.