English: Looking northeast across Lex and 91st at 92nd Street Y. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Sometimes you get more than you pay for.
That is certainly the case with the #140edu conference next week at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan where, if you are a teacher or student, $1.40 buys you two days of ideas, inspiration, conversation and connection with some of the more thoughtful, challenging, and engaging educators who have used social media in their classrooms or individual learning.
I should warn you, these are long days. Both of them, July 31 and August 1, start at 8:30AM and run until 5:45PM, with only 45 minutes for lunch, but don’t worry. You don’t have to sit and listen to it all. You can get up, walk out, go to the networking room or step outside, then go back for more. Trust me, you will need to do this because your head will explode if you don’t.
Just plan to be back in the hall by 11:50AM on the first day. That’s when I’ll be talking about How to Make Dropping Out of School Work for You. I don’t want to go into my whole talk here, but the thesis is that one can get an equivalent or better education using social media as one can by attending high school. I have no idea how I got included with the otherwise distinguished list of educators presenting here, but I did. Please come and disagree with me. Educators can register here for just $1.40 for the two days (you can disagree with a lot of people and make the conference even more cost effective if you like).
English: Infographic on how Social Media are being used, and how everything is changed by them. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
If you do go, and I hope you will, please come and say hello. I’ll be the one with the exploded head.
Education On The Plate 
Good for you Deven. Thank you for tackling the issue. Kudos!
Ok, so #edchat and a lot of the content-specific twtiter chats are fast-moving and may be hard to moderate if someone such as Secretary Duncan were to magically appear. The ISTE conference, on the other hand, would’ve been a great place for him to show up and meet some of the biggest movers and shakers in the education world. My point is that the Dept is bad at more than social media – they’re bad at socializing period! All roads once led TO Rome… which made Rome the most important place in the world because all of the knowledge and wealth were flowing INTO the city and influencing the government. Unfortunately in the US all of our roads always seem to lead FROM Washington. Their policies are easily able to get out, but trying to get information or perception to go the other direction is impossible.