Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Announcing the 2011 Global Education Conference!

Because I was traveling, my co-chair for the 2011 Global Education Conference, Lucy Gray, took the lead on announcing our new conference website, dates, and call for proposal. But while I might be a week (or two!) late to the party, I promise I'm just as excited!

Part of my excitement is that we are organizing the conference in a Ning network. This has some tremendous advantages, including ease of communication, but also a proposal system that allows you to connect with potential presenters in advance on ideas you care about, and to comment on specific proposals. This particular brainstorm came about as part of the Library 2.011 Conference I'm running out of the Library 2.0 Ning network, so let me know what you think--I'm kind of stunned by the implications of an open proposal and networking process.

But on to the actual announcement!

The second annual Global Education Conference, a week-long event bringing together educators and innovators from around the world, will be held Monday, November 14 through Friday, November 18, 2011. The entire conference will be broadcast online for free using the Blackboard Collaborate platform (formerly known as Elluminate/Wimba).

The Global Education Conference is a collaborative and world-wide community effort organized by the Global Education CollaborativeClassroom 2.0, and Web 2.0 Labs, and is aimed at increasing opportunities for globally-connecting education activities and initiatives. Last year’s conference featured 387 sessions and 60 keynote addresses from 62 countries with over 15,000 participant logins. Sessions will be held in multiple time zones and multiple languages over the five days, and all of last years sessions are currently archived as a standing educational resource at http://globaledcon.weebly.com/recordings.html.

The Call for Proposals for the 2011 event is now open at http://globaleducation.ning.com/page/call-for-proposals. Presenters can submit proposals for general sessions focused on one of four possible tracks: Teacher Track; Student Track; Curricular Track; and Policy and Leadership Track. Proposals should focus on ideas, projects, and initiatives that promote global understanding and collaboration. The deadline for submissions is October 15 and participants will be notified of acceptance by October 30. Keynote presentations are by invitation only.

Session proposals are to be non-commercial. Interest in commercial sponsorship or presentations should be directed to me at steve@hargadon.com.

As we did last year, we encourage non-commercial organizations to become conference partners (we had over 90 partner organizations last year!). Conference partners will be given a spotlight session this year. More information at http://globaleducation.ning.com/page/conference-partners.

We'll also be hoping for another incredible outpouring of volunteer support like we had last year (those of you who helped were AMAZING!). If you'd like to help promote awareness of the conference by serving on our International Advisory Board go to http://globaleducation.ning.com/page/intl-advisory-board, or if you are willing to volunteer to help moderate sessions (making you an absolute rockstar!) go to http://globaleducation.ning.com/page/volunteers-1.

For further information, please join our network at http://globaleducationconference.com and follow conference announcements on Twitter (@GlobalEdCon) and the hashtag #GlobalEd11.

No comments:

Post a Comment

I hate having to moderate comments, but have to do so because of spam... :(