Educon and Bridging Communities

This weekend I have the pleasure of heading up north towards Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to visit the Science Leadership Academy and be inspired by the many folks I follow and converse with on Twitter. It's my first year at Educon and I love their philosophy of focusing on "Conversations" rather than traditional sessions that have a tendency to take the form of standard lectures. Mostly I love it because it means instead of preparing weeks in advance I get to ask you for help and input. Educon is heavily focused in K-12 which is interesting because while I don't work in K-12 I've always had a vested interest in it both because of my work with VSTE as well as the connection from my wife who teaches Kindergarten. I've had the opportunity to meet and work with plenty of great folks doing work in the public K-12 school system. Folks like Tom Woodward, Frank Fitzpatrick, Tim Stahmer, Ben Rimes, and surely many many more I'm forgetting. I strongly believe that for folks like me that want to see higher education succeed and grow, we've got to continue to collaborate with fellow educators in K-12. Often that relationship has been tenuous and forced. This year I'll be speaking at a session conversation along with Tim Stahmer, Martha Burtis, Tom Woodward, and Jeff McClurken entitled Building Bridges - Communities of Practice from K-16 where we hope to talk about these relationships between the two sectors and how we build them. And here's where I'd love to have you involved. We want to bring in voices from our personal network and beyond. To that end if you have a few moments I'd love for you to head over to this Google Doc and add your experiences having collaborated across these sectors. We welcome both positive and negative contributions recognizing that it's a little of both (probably with a bias towards the negative). We will use information in this Google Doc to guide the conversation on Saturday. If you're coming to Educon I look forward to meeting you, if not I hope you'll participate and be engaged through these online lenses.