Cons for Your Calendar
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Kathy Ishizuka -- School Library Journal, 11/13/2007 1:47:00 PM
It's never too early to start your conference planning, and the 2008 season is just around the corner. Beyond the American Library Association's (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in January, there are some education technology events that media specialists should know about. And if you can’t make it to the physical programs—you can follow along online.
Set for March 4, 2008, EduBloggerCon–West will take place in conjunction with the Computer-Using Educators (CUE) Conference. A regional meeting of California educators, CUE will convene in Palm Springs March 6–8. Whether you're an educational blogger or just a reader of blogs, all are invited to participate in the preconference meeting EduBloggerCon, according to organizer Steve Hargadon, founder of online education community Classroom 2.0. He says that the free event is "based on the idea of an 'unconference' and is being organized by the participants in real time here on the wiki," where participants can log on and register.You can also see who else is coming.
EduBloggerCon is worthwhile for media specialists, according to Joyce Valenza, teacher-librarian and SLJ blogger. She attended the first such meeting, which took place at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Atlanta in June 2007. "It was a great mix of classroom teachers, administrators, tech directors, academics, and a few of us librarians," Valenza wrote in a related blog post.
Another EduBloggerCon will take place on June 28 in San Antonio, TX, in conjunction with NECC 2008. Yes, once again this year's NECC conflicts with ALA's annual conference (June 26–July 2) in Anaheim, CA, which forces librarians to make a choice. Valenza missed out on last year's ALA, opting instead to attend NECC. But she wrote, "I think it was important that a few of us made the choice of Atlanta over DC, especially for this event [EduBloggerCon] in which I think three librarians participated. We needed to represent. And I believe we did."
