So my three day, two night, five presentation blogvangelism worldwind was just way too much fun for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was getting to meet some of the people who are continually teaching me by their willingness to share their ideas online. David Warlick for intstance. And Susan Herzog. And Steven Cohen. And Michael Stephens. And meeting all sorts of other educators who are out there plugging away at bringing all of these technologies to their schools or to their practice. It was just a great couple of days.

Some brief impressions/vignettes:

*At the Internet@Schools East conference a librarian from an inner city D.C. school came up and told me that while she found the technologies interesting, she didn’t know how to even start thinking about using them at her school. “Most of my kids can’t read,” she said. It was a sobering reminder of what many teachers are faced with.

*At my CIL presentation on wikis, I showed them how easy it was to edit content by going to a Star Trek wiki entry on “Sick Bay” (which is amazing in itself) and changing it to “Slick Bay.” One of the attendees took me to task at the end of the presentation for showing how easy it was to vandalize a site, and it was a great point. I hadn’t meant it as that, obviously, but I also hadn’t fixed what I had done, and she felt, rightly so, that it sent a bad message. As she was talking, I was furiously back tracking through my presentation to go back and repair the damage. But, as luck would have it, it turned into a teachable moment when everyone saw the page had already been fixed when I pulled it back up.

*In Detroit, I was amazed with fully ¾ of the audience raised their hands when I asked how many of them knew what blogs were. And, remarkably, about the same number raised their hands about RSS. Now that was a shocker. But between the three conferences, there were over 15 presentations on technologies stemming from the Read/Write Web. The word is getting out.

*My presentations were blogged by David and and Christina Pikas which for some reason feels kind of weird. In fact, Christina may very well be the person who expressed her disdain at my messing with the Star Trek site.

*I was also amazed at how many people came up to me saying their districts were blocking sites like Blogger. Oy.

*There are now really bad pictures of me all over the Internet. Yuk.

* The technology worked…everywhere! Amazing.

More as it all settles in, I’m sure…