Attending Learning Impact 2007 – Reworked Schedule for Tuesday Strands

Google Docs & Spreadsheets – Learning Impact 2007 – Tuesday Strands

I am in Vancouver attending the IMS Learning Impact (formerly Alt-i Lab) conference until Wednesday. The conference goes until Thursday but I am giving a talk at the BCLA conference as well as visiting with Brian at UBC so will miss the last day.

So far it has been about par for the course for a ‘biggish’ educational technology conference. Stunningly dull keynotes but lots of great conversations with some very smart people, in truth really the reason I am here.

Yet what’s frustrating to me is that for a group dedicated to using networks and computers for learning, there is no innovation going on in how the conference itself is conducted. There is no online directory of attendees (at least not one I can find), no apparent backchannnel or other ways for attendees to network digitally. Which is why I am posting this here. Above is a link to a reworked schedule for today, done in Google docs, which shows the parallel strands as, well, parallel strands, not spearated on individual pages like on the website. Uggh! There are actually quite a few sessions of interest, but instead of having to flip back and forth, you can just see the strands side-by-side and decide where you want to be. Hardly innovative, but apparently nobody thought to do it. I used Excel’s “import data from the web” capabilities (which if you’ve never tried, provides another great way to scavange data for mashups) and then simply imported that doc into Google docs. Easy peasy. Here’s hoping foor some good sessions for the rest of the day! – SWL