Tag: conferences

👓 Call for Speakers – July 25-27, 2019 – Portland, Oregon | WPCampus 2019 Conference: Where WordPress Meets Higher Education

Read Call for speakers - WPCampus 2019 Conference: Where WordPress Meets Higher Education - July 25-27, 2019 - Portland, Oregon (WPCampus )
WPCampus is looking for stories, how-tos, hypotheticals, demos, case studies and more for our fourth annual in-person conference focused on WordPress in higher education.
I’m glad that the PressEd Conference’s main schedule page has links and embedded versions of all of yesterday’s talks on each of the individual session pages.

The best part of reading through them on the day after is being able to read and react to all the additional conversations and sub-threads. There’s also more time to catch what I missed and read and reflect on some of the more dense links to other sources. I hope I can manage to digest it all before PressEDConf20 is upon us.

It was a huge amount of effort and work by our wonderful hosts and all the presenters. Congratulations all around!

Garrish rainbow colored background with the name PressED, April 18th on Twitter along with their URL and hashtag

Replied to Terry Greene on Twitter (Twitter)
#​PressEdConf19 #​hallwaytrack

Following Virtually Connecting

Followed Virtually Connecting (http://virtuallyconnecting.org/)

logo for Virtually Connecting featuring what looks like the Earth, but the landmasses are faces looking at each other and the globe is wearing headphones

Enhancing the virtual event experience

The purpose of Virtually Connecting is to enliven virtual participation in academic conferences, widening access to a fuller conference experience for those who cannot be physically present at conferences. We are a community of volunteers and it is always free to participate.

Using emerging technologies, we connect onsite conference presenters and attendees with virtual participants in small groups. This allows virtual conference participants to meet and talk with conference presenters and attendees in what often feels like those great spontaneous hallway conversations, something not usually possible for a virtual experience. There is only room for 10 in each session but we record and, whenever possible, live stream, to allow additional virtual attendees to participate in the discussion by listening and asking questions via Twitter.

Reflections on WordCamp Santa Clarita Valley 2019

I really had a grand time at WordCamp Santa Clarita Valley yesterday. I’d like to thank the visionary Joe Simpson, Jr. and his entire group of fantastic organizers and kind volunteers for putting the entire thing together. I couldn’t imagine a better launch for a brand new camp.

College of the Canyons was a fantastic location for the camp and even had some excellent outdoor patio and dining space for lunch.

I do wish I’d been able to make my schedule work out to have been able to attend on Friday. I’m particularly bummed that I didn’t get to see Glenn Zucman’s presentation as he’s always doing some of the most interesting and creative things with WordPress. I’ll wait patiently for WordPress.tv to deliver it for me.

Some of my favorite highlights:

  • David Nuon wearing a blonde Richard Dean Anderson wig during his talk MacGyver plays with blocks: Using the Gutenberg editor in new and surprising ways
  • Chatting with Kat Christofer of Woo Commerce about how she and the Woo team create better documentation for their product. I think there’s some things we can learn for documenting pieces of the IndieWeb experience with WordPress. She also mentioned the beginning of a new short Mustang road trip.
  • Joseph Dickson going old school on Upgrading Kubrick for Gutenberg. His highlighting the fact that the editor is able to better mirror the ultimate output as a time saver is an intriguing idea.
  • Not that they aren’t always in general, and I didn’t think about it until reflecting on it today, but I also want to mention the spectacular diversity of speakers and attendees at the camp. It really made for a better and more well-rounded experience. I’ll give all the credit to Joe and his team who I suspect are directly responsible for designing it to be that way from the very beginning.

On a more personal level, my two favorite parts included:  Seeing the viceral reactions of a handful of people as the proverbial light switch was turned on when they realized the power and flexibility of the posting interfaces provided by micropub clients during my talk. There was also a palpable rush at the end while using a few minutes of extra time demoing some examples of my website and and the power of Micropub, Webmention, and backfeed along with some other IndieWeb goodness. I’ve already had a number of people following up with additional questions, conversations, and emails.

For those who may have missed them, here is a link to my slides from the Micropub and WordPress talk and a link to some of the bigger pieces I’ve wrtitten about with respect to WordPress and IndieWeb technologies in the past. Naturally, these are only a supplement to the hundreds of others who are working in and documenting the space. 

I’ll also give a special thanks to Joseph Dickson for the photo/tweet of me just before the talk:

The metal and glass edifice framed by the blue sky of the Santa Clarita Valley
Dr. Dianne G. Van Hook University Center on the campus of College of the Canyons
Tables and chairs in foreground with campers chatting in middle ground and the impressive glass wall of the center in the background
Inside the Hook University Center where WordCamp Santa Clarita Valley 2019 was held
Clear signage directs pedestrians to WordCamp Santa Clarita at Hook University Center
Clear signage directs pedestrians to WordCamp Santa Clarita at Hook University Center
My name tag as a speaker at WordCamp Santa Clarita Valley
The front entrance of Brewery Draconum
The afterparty for WordCamp Santa Clarita was held at Draconum in Newhall
Long picnic tables and red umbrellas provided some great ambience with the sun shining brightly in the late afternoon
WordCampers from Santa Clarita gathering on the outdoor patio at Draconum

A selfie by Chris Aldrich with other campers in the background
Hanging out with old friends and new after WordCamp on the patio at Draconum.
Joseph Dixon, Erik Blair

🔖 We’re @VConnecting from #OER19 on April 10-11 | Virtually Connecting

Bookmarked We’re @VConnecting from #OER19 on April 10-11 by teresa (Almost There ... Virtually Connecting)
We will be joining this year’s OER conference coming from Galway, Ireland where the focus is on Recentering Open: Critical and global perspectives. We hope to facilitate critical discussion of Open including asking difficult questions about open education: Why open? Open for whom? Whose interests ...
I want to attend! God bless Virtually Connecting!

🔖 ETUG 25 Call for Proposals now open

Bookmarked ETUG 25 Call for Proposals now open by Clint Lalonde (etug.ca)
The Call for Proposals for the 25th anniversary ETUG conference is now open until April 5, 2019.
Share your knowledge, projects and ideas with the BC post-secondary education technology community at TRU in Kamloops, BC on June 20 & 21st. Program Theme & Topics Our overarching confe...
Replied to a tweet by Scott GruberScott Gruber (Twitter)
Some sketch instructions for attending remotely can be found here: https://indieweb.org/IndieWebCamps/Attendance
Perhaps we might try an intro remote session later this week to walk through everything in about 30 minutes to get people set up?

🔖 Where WordPress Meets Higher Education | WPCampus

Bookmarked WPCampus 2019 Call for Proposals: Save the Date! (WPCampus: Where WordPress Meets Higher Education)
Hello WPCampus friends! We’re excited to announce that our Call for Proposals for this year’s conference will be opening soon! We’re looking forward to another year of wonderful ideas, demonstrations, brainstorming, and benchmarking. Session Topics As in past years, we’re looking for a variety of topics on anything that might bring value to our community. …

🎧 PressED WordPress and Education twitter conference | Radio #EDUtalk 27-02-19 | EduTalk

Listened to Radio #EDUtalk 27-02-19: PressED WordPress and Education twitter conference from EDUtalk

Pat Lockley talking  about PressEd the conference about WordPress run completely on twitter. PressEd uncovers many aspects of the use of WordPress in all areas of education.

We discussed some of the aspects and features of running a conference on twitter the previous and upcoming conferences. Pat invites anyone who uses WordPress in any area of education to submit a proposal to the conference.

While listening to John Johnston on this topic, I couldn’t help but think how cool it would be if PressEd, an education related conference that is held online via Twitter, could actually be held on WordPress itself. There was a quick mention by Pat Lockley about their consideration of using the P2 theme to effect this, but they’re right in that P2 has been left behind on the side of the road.

I think that such a conference could be held online and actually use WordPress; it would require more of the participants to be using IndieWeb philosophies and technology/plugins like Webmention and perhaps one of the more modern feed readers that are using Microsub.

Alternately, I could see a place where a platform like IndieWeb.xyz could be leveraged as a location to which all the participants could syndicate their content to a particular sub there (it has the ability to force Webmentions for people who can’t send/receive them yet) and then act as the reader in which the conference was taking place. In this sense IndieWeb.xyz would act a bit like an impromptu planet to aggregate all the conversation. I haven’t looked, but if IndieWeb.xyz also had RSS or other feeds coming back out of individual subs, then it would be a bit more like a traditional planet and people could subscribe in their feed reader of choice, and with WebSub or an occasional manual refresh, a conference like this could be done directly from WordPress (or honestly any IndieWeb friendly platform/website) and have much the same impact. In fact, perhaps a bit more impact since all the presenters and participants would and could have archival copies of the conference on their own websites at the end of the day and the ephemeral nature of such an online conference could tend to disappear.

Incidentally, I could almost hear the gears turning in John’s head as I’m sure he was thinking much the same thing. He carefully restrained himself and managed to keep the conversation on track though.

Now I’ll have to brainstorm an IndieWeb for Education using WordPress proposal for this year’s pending PressEd Conference if there’s time left.

I loved the short snippet at the end of the episode where Pat Lockley gave a brief bio on his Twitter handle and domain name. It reminds me a bit of the podcast My URL Is, which I hope comes back with more episodes soon.

🔖 Open Apereo 2019 | Apereo

Bookmarked Open Apereo 2019 (Apereo)
Open Apereo 2019 is an international, inclusive event offered by the Apereo Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to developing and sustaining innovative open-source software solutions for education. Learn how higher education is using open-source software to help deliver the academic mission, control costs, and retain the capacity to innovate.

🔖 Computational Complexity Conference 2019: Call for Papers

Bookmarked Computational Complexity Conference 2019: Call for Papers (computationalcomplexity.org)
Submission Deadline: Tuesday, February 19, 2019, 5:00pm EST
The conference seeks original research papers in all areas of computational complexity theory, studying the absolute and relative power of computational models under resource constraints. We also encourage contributions from other areas of computer science and mathematics motivated by questions in complexity theory.
If you missed it, here are slides with links and resources for my IndieWeb and WordPress presentation at WordCamp Riverside 2018. Video coming soon. Thanks to everyone who came and participated. I’m happy to answer any additional questions.