Catshanghai

I’m delighted to be part of the organising committee for the Learning 2.008 Conference, which is taking place in Shanghai between September 18th and 20th at SCIS Hongqiao. It’s good to share company with such an enthusiastic, talented and forward looking group.

Learning 2.008 is South East Asia’s gathering of educators and learning technologists. It’s an international technology conference that focuses on learning. Last year’s event at Concordia International School was an inspiring and successful weekend of demos, dialogues, twitters, blog posts, podcasts and reflections about the future of learning. (See this summary)

We are planning even more interaction this year as the sessions will be driven by spontaneous unconference conversations rather than stand and deliver PowerPoint lectures. We are lucky to have top draw presenters such as David Warlick, Clarence Fisher, David Jakes and Marco Tores.

I’m particularly excited by the preconference Edubloggercon, which Jeff Utecht of The Thinking Stick has been talking this up on his blog.

Also I’m proud to announce that this year we will be running an EduBloggerCon. It will take place Thursday September 18th at 9am. Matt at Catshanghai and Amanda at From the Outside Looking In will be helping with the planning.We’ll start at 9am and we’ll go until we’re done or until we need to leave to head over to the conference at about 4:30pm. What a great opportunity to meet other bloggers, talk Web 2.0 and just hang out in Shanghai. So come join us!
The Thinking Stick | Jeff Utecht - Shanghai, China

The Edubloggercon exists outside the conference and the best thing is that it is free, although you’ll have to buy your own coffee. We’ll get the presenters to hang out with us, but we’d like to get local bloggers to come such as Kenneth Tan from Shanghaiist, or Wang Jian Shuo.

I’ve been given the job of finding a suitable venue for the Edubloggercon. Here are the criteria:

• Accessible from Hongqiao or downtown Shanghai
• Open in the morning at 9am
• Decent free wi-fi Internet access
• Power strips and sockets for bloggers to recharge their laptops and gadgets
• Space for 20 to 50 people to sit and chat in relative comfort (We will not know final numbers for ages)
• Good coffee
• Quintessentially Shanghainese or Chinese to remind us of the city we are in

It would also be nice to find a venue with a garden or terrace where we could sit and enjoy the late summer sunshine, but a good indoor venue would also be great. After some thought, here are a few contenders that need further investigation:

• Diage (Donghu Lu) - Elegant colonial mansion/ Japanese wine bar restaurant with fantastic outdoor garden. Does it have wi-fi?
• Element Fresh (Dong Hu Lu) - Great views of the city from the roof terrace and an indoor area if it rains
• KABB (Xintiandi)
• Kathleen’s 5(On top of Shanghai Art Museum) - has just been renovated and it has a roof terrace overlooking People’s Park
• Kommune (Taikang Lu) - has a coutyard terrace surrounded by lanes, art shops and cafes, which would be perfect if the weather was good
• Spago (Nanjing Xi Lu) has wi-fi, a projector and lots of space for meetings, but it is indoors
• The Door (Hongqiao)
• Shanghai Sculpture Space/Beca (Huai Hai Lu/ Hongqiao Lu)

If anyone has any better suggestions then I would like to know so we can find ourselves somewhere to kick off the conference. Here is the registration website if you would like to come along. It will help us with numbers.

The Edubloggercon should be seen as a taster for the weekend at Learning 2.008. International educators should still go to the Ning site to register for the main conference. $300 ($250 for EARCOS/ ACAMIS members) is great value for such an event, especially if you are in Shanghai and your school is paying.

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Tags: learn2cn, Shanghai, education, technology, edubloggercon