It has been a great honor for us being envited to the thought fest 09 at salford university – Manchester, UK. We got the possibility to present in a workshop our experiences in podcasting on higher education. Now it will be the time to leave – but will the thoughtfest still end? No, i think it will hall sustainable inside us. It is really hard to describe the mood and spirit outgoing of this event. It is at one hand the feeling of getting peoples met, you already seem to know a bit by their digital tracks, you on short or long distance. At the other hands it is the undescribable feeling of adding new friends – all sharing the same: Make the best in the use of web2.0, in higher education.
Two discussions had a great output i want to mention here: the first discussion happend in the first hour of the event. Catching the topic of digital idendities, which will be a raising topic in future, all got very directly and hard inside. The other discussion is still present in the inner eye, because it has been shortly before the final ending session: What can practicioners learn from the researchers and the other way around. I am really courious about the summarized outcome, because there was a lot of soul based input in this argumentation, which could be useful for future devlopment strategies.
So – writing this lines on the last day of our stay in Manchester, there is the question – was this the end of the thought fest 09? Hopefully not. For many reasons. First it seems that this was the end of a physical presence – but it still sustains in the networks. People were twittering that they arrived securely at home, people are twittering that they want to go next and figuring out the best location. People are sharing their summaries, their outcomes and hopefully there will be seeded some more experience, more energy to continue, more new topics which can be solved project based in the future.
Very interesting was the spirit of many of us, bridging to the interested world outside. There ere streams of the live sessions etc.
So thought fest 09 – for me – reached a spike and did one of the best things I can imagine – it made curious to other people fields topics, it made known each other and it makes learning from each other.
Bis denne
Andreas Auwärter
Check out the reports from others here:
@Josie Fraser http://fraser.typepad.com/socialtech/2009/03/thoughtfest-09.html
@Pat Parslow http://brains.parslow.net/ThoughtFest09
