I arrived in Halifax today, but was unable to make it to any of the presentations of the GLBTQ Preconference, which I wanted to attend but was unable to due to my plane and travel schedule. I was able to see Julie Gedro of Empire State College, who is a colleague of mine for several years now through AHRD and AERC and whose passion and energy in her teaching and research inspire me when I face my own academic hurdles. With her I met Tonette Rocco who is at Florida International University and is the Editor of New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development. was reintroduced to David Brightman, the editor at Jossey-Bass who I met last year and who supports the work and efforts of many of the scholars who attend this conference and help to make it happen. I then bumped into Andre Grace, the coordinator of the preconference / president of CASAE / supporter and encourager of my own preconference presentation last year, who invited me to one of the professor’s who spoke today who was having a gathering at his home here in Halifax. 

What a wonderful way to start the conference itself. I did not have any wine or cheese or food or drink; but to be around some of these people again lifts my spirits and makes me both look forward to tomorrow as well as be thankful I was able to make it here again this year. I wonder who else I will see tomorrow, both from the past as well as new into the future. Ahhh, the ideas and thoughts that await. Interesting way to begin a research project!

I have started my trip to Halifax for the AERC 2007 conference. While I am presenting a paper there (see my post yesterday), this time my conference experience will be different from previous ones. The major difference is that I plan to live blog this conference, or at least my experiences at this conference, as part of a research project I am working on.

There are a few issues I need to mention and begin discussing at the outset. Firstly, live blogging is a relatively new concept. There is little research around it thus far (I hope to begin changing that). There are even different names for this: live blogging, live-blogging, and liveblogging–I have used all three of them in different situations, and plan to use the term as a single word as per the model of the great community and educationally-oriented blogger, Beth Kanter (though even she uses it with one and two words in different places). There is not a common understanding of what its purpose is–Seth Godin, a favorite author and speaker of mine, mused recently about his experiences presenting while many audience members were lost in their own blogging about their immediate personal experiences during a presentation. Christian Long has some interesting things to say about it. To expedite this, it appears a number of serious bloggers use offline blog editors (programs) so that things can be written even without a direct connection to the blog itself and then posted later. This also allows for a smoother writing–I am using ecto for this, and have already found a few features I like more (it automatically creates Technorati tags) as well as less (it does not automatically detect and submit trackbacks) than using the web interface of Movable Type itself. 

With all these unresolved issues to face before I even arrive in Halifax itself (I am writing this while waiting at Newark Airport), it seems to me that this medium is still in its early stages. Hmmm, early stages for both practitioners as well as researchers. Seems like a ripe place to begin my practitioner research then, especially at this friendly and academic adult education conference.

Technorati Tags: Beth Kanter, live blogging, liveblogging, live-blogging, Seth Godin