After spending an exhilerating couple of days at the Global Summit, I am happy to say that the opportunities for more learning haven’t stopped yet. Now it’t time to dip into the K12 Online conference which is already well underway.

Nevertheless, the roundup of the Global Summit has been a bit hard to track, therefore for anyone who missed out finding or following the Global Summit, here is the link that will give you all the papers, presentations, podcasts and related links. You’ll want to save some of these for later!

But for now, if you haven’t already caught up with the news of the K12 Online Conference, go to it now! There has been some criticism of this initiative by some blogosphere gurus.

My take on this is that they are great leaders, but perhaps they could do with some grassroots involvement to see how important the material coming out of K12 online is for teachers and people like myself working with teachers who are wanting to learn more about Web 2.0.

I have promoted K12 Online to my schools – and at a Web 2.0 Workshop I ran last week was delighted to find that some teachers had picked up on the promotion, and were ‘cherrypicking’ the conference papers – and were very pleased with the information they were getting. I guess Stephen’s pessimistic comments aren’t true – at least not ‘downunder’.

I want to really thank those people who put up such great material in Week 1. This hands-on, step-by-step compilation of training and motivation via Web 2.0 is terrific and just what we need! I am not a great fan of online conferences personally, simply because I find it hard to follow online along with my usual busy day at work. But being able to pull down all the material during or after is ‘just the ticket’.

So the Web 2.0 sushi train has goodies from the Global Summit, and now K12 Online. Very nice thank you.

Some further thoughts.

I really like the idea of ‘grass-roots’ driven professional learning. After a couple of school terms promoting Web 2.0 via a number of routes, I am delighted to report that people are now ‘asking‘ to have a hands-on workshop – not formal training, but a ‘sandpit’ ‘lets learn this together’ approach.

In keeping with the informal but informative approach, and using Web 2.0 tools exclusively, I have begun to use delicious (with the tag ‘training’) (includes the link to set up the IE extension as part of the workshop – nice one!) and flickr to provide materials for these sessions – the point being that I provide these at the same time as working with folks to set up their own social bookmarking, and discovering what photosharing can do. Another one coming up this thursday….hard to keep up with the demand 😉

In addition, I held a full day session with school leaders of the Stanhope School Project – involving 3 schools. Greg Whitby was interviewed by Leigh Blackall about this. We have actually started the journey of change and this workshop was one of many more sessions to come. You can pick up a very short, very rough record of the day at Heyjude’s BlipTV.