COMO Conference 2010: Canidate Leader

I attended the COMO conference in Athens, GA in October  14th-15th  2010.  This was a great conference and confirmed my belief that I wanted to work in the Instructional Technology Field. The keynote speaker was Michael Porter who spoke about the future of libraries and teaching and working and visiting libraries from around the world it was very interesting.  I attended a morning session about USA vs China schools. This was very interesting. The teacher who led the panel had traveled to China to visit their schools and libraries and talked about the similarities and differences.  I then went to lunch in downtown Athens with a Georgia Author! (Long and interesting story) For the first afternoon session I went to a lecture that was given by the Athens Clarke County Library about using social media in the library. This is something that was alot of interest to me. The session was about how and why the ACC library uses twitter and Facebook to promote their library. The final afternoon session I went to was given by none other than our own GSU Instructional Technology Department and it was based on the Horizion Report. I was impressed with the findings of the report and also impressed with all of the different Web 2.0 software that was used to show the findings of the report. This was my first indoctrination of all the new and exciting web based presentation software.  The second day I attended another lecture by Michael Porter and also a very interesting workshop on the creation and use of wikipedia. I learned about the history of Wikipedia and how it can be used in the classroom. The closing speech was given by Buffy Hamilton. Also, presented was the future of technology. This was very interesting because it included things such as brain controlled machines, a computer the size of a pen, and other new technologies. Overall this was a very worthwhile conference and I am glad I went. I felt that I grew professionally from the COMO conference.  Time 16 hours