Unless you have had the privilege in participating in one of these, you may be asking yourself, “What the heck is an UNconference??”

An unconference is where you get a bunch of people together who want to learn something and then scrap the panel and kick the speakers out the door.   Let’s face it, lectures are nice, but there is just no substitution for interaction.

In an unconfernece, the participants (not the leaders) select the topics they want to discuss through a brief session of brainstorming.  After a quick organizational break (inserting lunch works well) the leaders organize all the feedback from the participants into main topics for disucssion.  The large group breaks into smaller groups and the leaders facilitate conversation within those groups. The leader’s job isn’t to lecture or educate, it’s to LEAD the conversation.  You know, keep it on track, ask questions, spice things up with some controversy…etc.

I am excited to be facilitating a session at this year’s eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference. This conference has over 6,000 attendees and more than 450 concurrent sessions!  The social media unconference is a special session being held in the middle of the day on Feb. 4th.  Upon completion of the unconference, all learnings and notes will be posted on the wiki page linked above.  I will also tweet out the link from the InnoGage twitter account.

Related posts:

1. Social Media Experiment: #NACAC08
2. Starting a Social Media Campaign
3. Blogs: Cornerstone of Social Media – Video Interview
4. How to WIN with Social Media
5. OSU on Social Media

Conferences convention education eTech K-12 Ohio unconference