Looking forward to PodCampAZ 2008

I look forward to attending PodCampAZ 2008, having enjoyed the event last year while volunteering at the registration desk.

PodCampAZ 2008 is a social media UnConference taking place right here in Tempe, AZ on November 1st and 2nd. I bet I'll be pretty tired, this coming right after Educause as it does, but I also bet it will be a whole lot of fun and a chance to learn from some talented and energetic people. Kathy Jacobs's session last year showcasing screencasting with Camtasia Studio inspired me to create a simple DLM screencast shared via this blog earlier this year. Given that I haven't gotten much further than that with screencasting even having attended Kathy Jacob's excellent session, I'm looking forward to Terry Lee's Screencasting help for newbies session.

This year I hope to learn something about podcasting from Evo Terra and perhaps bring an audio element to this blog. I'm intrigued by Isreal Hyman's assertion that anyone can learn to shoot video since I've been attending Cris Holdorph's digital photography special interest group.

Most directly related to my work with Unicon, I plan to attend Time Barrow, Alisa Cooper and Shelley Rodrigo's session on Web 2.0 in the Classroom.

Pamela Slim's talk on How to strike a balance between sharing information freely and making a living using New Media also sounds worthwhile -- this is something I've been thinking about off and on while playing my small roles in the uPortal manual (a freely available wiki manual for uPortal), Unicon's Cooperative Support for uPortal and Sakai programs (commercial technical support for uPortal featuring a publicly available no-subscription-required-to-access knowledge base of the questions and answers that result from providing that support), and in Unicon's proprietary training offerings.

To date I've given "exergames" just about zero thought, but I did recently become the proud owner of a Wii Fit (and I do think it's succeeding in motivating me to live a more active lifestyle to make at least a non-embarassing running in the in-progress employee "biggest loser" competition) so if I can find time for Biray Alsac's session on exergaming, I'll welcome working that into the mix. Beyond helping out my health a bit, Giovanni Gallucci has carved out the more ambitious topic of saving the world with social media. That's daring enough that I might have to seek him out and figure out what he means by that.

PodCampAZ is an "unconference", which means I'm mostly taking the wrong approach in this blog post -- it's not just about the speakers and their sessions, it's about casually running into interesting people with different experiences involving new and social media, making new connections, sharing background, and learning from one another. I'm looking forward to all of that in-between-the-sessions activity. If you're thinking of attending and would like to meet up at PodCampAZ or otherwise would like to get in touch about it, please feel free to contact me.