A window on the world

Day Two of the Social Age Safari took place yesterday. 40 people in the room and over 100 people online. Using iPhones and iPads, the wider community had the opportunity to listen in to sessions and also to have their say through video links and Twitter.

The connectivity, curation and hosting has been incredibly well managed by Julian Stodd’s team at Sea Salt Learning.

It has been the opportunity for me to connect with so many new people from around the world. The conversations have been lively and punctuated with new information, new ideas and thought provoking challenge. It has been the biggest opportunity to engage with people from different sectors to my own.

During the break at 17.0 I went to meet Phillip Kingsbury and Laura Williams who were working on the event newspaper which was issued at regular intervals throughout the event. I really enjoyed learning about the geeky processes behind this and the backup in place in case no-one made contributions. It is a sign of the levels of engagement at this event that Laura and Phillip have been inundated with contributions.

Through the long long day (began at 8.0 and finished at 23.0) we took part in two hacks to unpack what we mean by social learning, social leadership and the social age. The conversations in these hacks were fabulous. Groups of 8-12 people working together on three key questions to develop responses. There were also breakout sessions on blogging and graffiti at lunchtime, and further breakouts on approaches to large scale social learning in the evening. We had further contributions from Poet Selby and Folk Musician Catherine Burke with her band.

The journey has been a long one – still the whole of Friday to go – but so far, it has been both stimulating and awe-inspiring. To be in a room with so much talent, learning from everyone is a valuable process.

I am hoping that this is the beginning of some great new connections that will further enhance the work that I lead.

I will post once more about the event once it has closed and will talk about my reflections on the whole process together with my take-aways and fundamental learning. Thanks for reading.

Also published on Medium.