Ulearn14 conference was different for me this year because of tweeting

I have been going to Ulearns for a few years now, not all ten that have been held, but quite a few of them.  I really feel like I got a lot more out of ULearn this year.  I think the reason was that I tweeted a lot.  I decided that instead of making notes that I lose or get hopelessly out of order, I would try and record keynotes and workshops by taking photos of slides and writing 140 character tweets on what I was hearing.
And as a result, my tweets got retweeted and I made connections with other educators that I have not met.  If someone retweeted, then I made sure I followed that person, too, and in the evenings, as I sat alone with my miserable head cold and recapped the day, I looked through the tweets and remembered a lot more that what I would normally have done, and felt connected.
Visuals make all the difference, and so does the fact that you have an authentic audience. In addition, if you use "Storify", you can get all the relevant tweets up in order and make comments as you go.  I didnt have time for that just yet but it is something I will do.
As well as that, I was able to use Tweetdeck on my laptop to manage to review the tweets of the day with the hashtags #ulearn14.
So I have been slow to get on board with tweeting, as I felt that I had all the extra external contact I needed through Feedly and Diigo, but it did make my whole Ulearn experience much better: -  more useful and more memorable and more recollectable and more connected.
As I look over the tweets this morning, my favouriteimage of the day so far is one that came from an overseas tweeter @shirljud1 who retweeted a tweet that I made about someone at the conference.  Rings true on many planes.

Twitter, I made a mistake about you.  There is a place for you in my life.

Today was all good.

My four main learnings today came from

• Keynote speaker ( Joram Harpez) - that we must choose an educational ideology.  Must we?  I am still not sure.  Of course the individuation was my choice, but I am not sure that socialisation and acculturation cannot be integrated into the model as well.  I might have to read more!  
• How do we learn? Mark Treadwell presenting.  Revisiting his work was a real treat for me.  Must read more!  
• Google Fest a group collaboration on SAMR then a grand slam.  Fun.  Too many people.
• Keynote speaker. (Adam Lefstein) Enjoyable look at professional discourse and conversations. Great advice but not sure about the good professional discourse from Israel shown as an example.  I thought the principal lacked vision in his conversation.  I also thought his approach was all wrong - it was quite "superior" and not collegial or collaborative in tone.  The conversation was about the "what" and "how", not the "why".  Perhaps I need to read more. 

Big picture learning: the over-whelming number of participants are primary school teachers - do we need a secondary school focus or stream for the next Ulearn?  What is happening in secondary schools?  Can we have a 50:50 turn out next year on primary to secondary?
Yes, I will give feedback.

The meeting up with people was great.  Awesome catchup with friends and foes.  

The good and the bad and the ugly at ULearn Mobile Learning Day 2014

The Good
Today, we kicked off ULearn 2014 in Rotorua with the Mobile Learning Day.  I was clever enough to choose Tom Barrett's workshop on Learning as Inquiry for my first.  Tom had a model of learning through inquiry which was very easy to understand and could be applied to many learning situations.  Along with that model, he had Thing-linked a heap of digital tools which could be used at each stage of the inquiry.  Thanks for such a useful morning, Tom. Here follows a little storify of mainly my tweets as I listened in.  It is really great to be able revisit these tweets alongside his notes.  Great prompts for remembering.

The Bad
By contrast, I became frustrated and even angry at my afternoon workshop where the presenter had quite a few digital tools to address a pedagogy that, it was obvious that she knew very little about.  Now I don't want to sound like a know-it-all but when the tools were being used just for showcasing the tools, the workshop became meaningless.  There has to be some semblance of substance about the knowledge being learned.  You can't crowd-source knowledge for two and a half hours from a crowd that had very little understanding of the topic.  They were there to find out about the topic, and instead got to use some of the tools which could be useful once they had the knowledge.  They made resources based on their lack of knowledge for the rest of the time.
The Ugly
 I hate to see teachers going away from a workshop ill-informed, which is what they would have done.  Teacher pd time is precious, especially for those who have give up out of school time.
I have to admit, my feedback was pretty scathing.  And I am sorry for that,  because it is not easy standing in front of a group of teachers and presenting a workshop. However,  I do hope that she learns from that.  During my teaching life I have been taught to take on board good feedback and discard any negative feedback that you don't think is warranted, but act on what you think is warranted.   You don't need to argue or discuss, just do it.  However part of me still feels ugly for being unkind.
So that's it.  My first day at Ulearn 2014.  The good, the bad and the ugly.