We are excited to be Virtually Connecting again from the Digital Pedagogy Lab 2019!! The lab takes place in University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia. We have a wonderful mix of keynote speakers, track leaders, participants, fellows and students at the event joining us for Virtually Connecting.
We have six (6) sessions planned over the course of the conference – hybrid sessions in which participants who are not at the event can have informal hallway conversations with others present at the conference (that means you can chat with our guests according to the schedule below!)
Note about new technology:
Google Hangout On-Air is disappearing as of August 1st, so we will be using Zoom instead (thanks to previous crowdfunding a few years ago and a generous contribution from one of our Advisory Buddies Michael Berman).
We are able to livestream to our YouTube account but we do not have embedded YouTube players here in the blog post as we usually do. Instead we will ask you to watch Twitter as we tweet out the link when we go live for each session.
To join a session virtually:
With Zoom we are trying something new by just publishing the link to join the session here on the page. We do ask that you still register via this form or reach out on Twitter so that we can send reminder emails but you can also just drop into a session. Below is the link (we intentionally left it unclickable to ensure no one clicks on it by mistake). All the sessions for DPL will use this same link:
https://zoom.us/j/6380777555
If you’re interested in joining the conversation online there are many ways for you to connect – fill in this form, reach out to the Virtual Buddy that is leading up the session that you are interested in (their twitter handles are linked), tweet us @vconnecting, or leave a comment below. We’ll ask for your email address so we can send you a link to the session just before it goes live. The session time is local to the conference site in Fredericksburg Virginia, USA which is Eastern Time, but our timebuddy widget shows you the time adjusted to your timezone.
Monday, August 5th at 12:15pm
Onsite buddies Rissa Sorsensen-Unruh, Kate Molloy, and Samatha Veneruso, are meeting up with Ruha Benjamin, Sheri Spelic, Sean Michael Morris, and Kelly Baker. Our Virtual Buddies Maha Bali and Autumm Caines will welcome our virtual guests.
Tuesday, August 6th at 4:30pm
Onsite buddies Rissa Sorsensen-Unruh, Kate Molloy, Sarah Lohnes-Watulak, and Benjamin Doxtdator are meeting up with Kim Jaxon, Jim Luke, and Megan Lin. Our Virtual Buddies Maha Bali and Rebecca Hogue will welcome our virtual guests.
Wednesday, August 7th at 3:45pm
This is a special in-workshop session!!! Sarah Lohnes-Watulak is leading up the onsite workshop “Let’s Make EdTech Wikipedia Better” where she will lead up an edit-a-thon on Wikipedia pages that are focused on EdTech. The point is to work on “diversifying sources and bolstering critical perspectives” on these pages and the session will end with a Virtually Connecting session! Our Virtual Buddy Autumm Caines will welcome virtual participants to talk with the editors about the pages that they are working on and the edits that they are making.
Wednesday, August 7th at 5:15pm
This is our special session dedicated to Student Voice!!! Digital Pedagogy Lab had a special incentive this year for schools that wanted to bring students and so Virtually Connecting is holding a session dedicated to Student Voice at the conference! Onsite buddies Sundi Richard and Samatha Veneruso, are meeting up with Lora Taub, Ikra Javed, Julie Fellmayer, Cassie Nooyen, Ruthie Tucker, and Noraya Razzaque. Our Virtual Buddies Christina Hendricks and Joe Murphy will welcome our virtual guests.
Thursday, August 8th at 12pm
Onsite buddies Rissa Sorsensen-Unruh, Kate Molloy, and Benjamin Doxtdator are meeting up with Kevin Gannon, Maida Ali, and Bonnie Stewart. Our Virtual Buddies Autumm Caines and Greg McVerry will welcome our virtual guests.
Thursday, August 8th at 12:30pm
Onsite buddies Rissa Sorsensen-Unruh, Kate Molloy, and Benjamin Doxtdator are meeting up with Robin DeRosa, Rajiv Jhangiani, and Jessica Chretien. Our Virtual Buddies Terry Green and Greg McVerry will welcome our virtual guests.
How to Participate
If you’re new to Virtually Connecting, read more about us.
You can participate virtually in any of the following ways:
- Active session participation: be a participant in these sessions and talk to the guests and other participants. To do so, we ask that you register by filling this form, tweeting to the Virtual Buddy for your session, to our main account @VConnecting, or by leaving a comment below. One of us will contact you to get your email address, and then you will get a confirmation email a day or so before the event, with a reminder of time and the link to participate in Zoom session around half an hour before the event. All you need in order to do this is to have working audio on your computer or phone/tablet and have Zoom installed on your computer (though Zoom does also work on browser without installing the app) or have the phone app. You can also participate in the session and communicate with other session guests via text chat (the virtual buddy will occasionally read out what you wrote or invite you to say it out loud).
- Watch and tweet: watch the session live (see Twitter for updated links to watch, or go to our YouTube channel). If you choose to Tweet along, please tag @VConnecting and add the conference hashtag (#digped). One of our buddies is likely to pick up on your questions on Twitter and relay them to the participants in the live session.
- Watch the recording later: watch the session recorded (we will embed the recorded YouTube videos above, or our YouTube channel).
- Become a buddy: If after you’ve participated you’d like to join our team and help organize future events, become a “buddy” by joining Virtually Connecting. We’ll add you to our Slack team which we use for this purpose.
Are you physically at the conference?
If you are attending the conference and wondering what’s for me, stop by any of our sessions or reach out to one of our Onsite Buddies to connect. All sessions at DPL will take place in Room 213 in the Hurley Convergence Center.
You don’t have to appear on camera. We would love for you to come by, listen to the conversation, take pictures, and tweet about the experience (don’t forget to tag us @VConnecting and use the conference hashtag).
Is there a hashtag for those of us participating virtually?
Best of luck to those of you who are fellows and participants.
Something I would like to see this year that
I am not sure will be specifically addressed is consideration of this question,
“How can our digital pedagogy remain relevant to our learners and communities in an age of
collapse?” I know I will be asking this question ad nauseum throughout the week and continuously throughout the rest of my digital pedagogy. We need to justify
the carbon resources being released into the ecosphere as result of this conference and it seems to me
answering this question should be foundational.
Terry, I think of it as collecting ideas to adapt in a time of collapse if education becomes an exercise in samizdat.
Here’s a longer response, Vanessa. And thanks for knowing how to play the game of reciprocation in the comments section. You rock!