I am sitting in an unconference session called “Echo Chamber.” To my right Brian Crosby scratches his hair as Clarence Fischer, who sits to my left, proposes that an echo chamber may sometimes be a good thing, a source of rejuvenation. I can’t seem to articulate what I find disconcerting about the echo chamber. David Warlick occasionally peaks out from behind his laptop and offers some insight. I am a bit star-struck, sitting in this room with just the four of us; a few teachers from ISB stroll in and make me feel more knowledgeable. I want to say that communities need to be occasionally shaken up and infiltrated to keep them up to date. I am stuck in limbo between feeling respect and admiration for these men and then contemplating the fact that if I know that I am just as good of a teacher as any of them, then why do I feel inadequate in their presence. This back and forth plays with my emotions, rendering me unable to get my point across.

Don’t get me wrong; I immensely respect these men along with all of the presenters at Learning 2.008. An hour before I was listening to Ewan McIntosh talk about how tech tools are not transformative. Pedagogy is transformative. I have skimmed Ewan’s blog for months, but not until I saw him speak did I truly understand where he is coming from. Later, I would listen to Alan Levine discuss the Horizon project, and later still take notes on a back channel as Julie Lindsay extolled the virtue of mobile devices.

If Learning 2.008 taught me anything it is that digital networks are nothing more than real human beings trying to figure it all out. I am not sure I can define what “it” is exactly, but that is part of what we are trying to do. We can read each others blogs, talk on Skype, or follow Tweets, but these tools will only paint an abstract picture of who we really are. No matter how easy the new web makes it for people to communicate and build networks, we still need that authentic human interaction. We still need to watch body language, pay attention to tone of voice, and make people laugh to really connect with other human beings. Thank goodness for that.

It was refreshing to see that we are more than blog posts, avatars, and @names. The participants of this conference, by their presence alone proved that we are a group of diverse educators determined to find better ways to learn. No one truly knows the secret answer, because there is no secret answer. We, and I say we with pride because I learned that I too have ideas to offer, are simply trying to find ways to educate children as best we can. Technology is not the answer. It really doesn’t have much to do with technology at all. It has to do with community and the sharing of knowledge and ideas! Technology is simply a way for sharing ideas.  The questions that kept resurfacing at every session I attended was- how can we convince teachers to use technology? I think we need to help teachers learn how they can become members of vibrant communities, so that they can teach their students to expand their social networks as well. This can be completely outside the scope of technology. Jennifer Jones says it best,

“Before we connect globally, we need to connect locally, whether we use technology, or just step outside.  I feel this is critical to change in our systems.”

Technology is just a tool that at this time in our evolution is the most appropriate for creating wide, far-reaching, cooperative communities that foster, promote, and encourage learning. This conference taught me that communities take time to build and that they must be unique for each member. Session after session, time spent out at dinner with twitter friends, and time spent chatting over food with fellow tech enthusiasts, taught me that my network is like a garden, in that it constantly needs to be tended.

When I first started blogging I wanted nothing more than a robust interactive audience. I wanted the largest number of people to read by posts. Like my students, I wanted to watch the little red globs infect my cluster map like a cancer. I constantly examined by statistics to see how many people had read what I wrote. I wished that the “big” names would read my work, realize my genius, and catapult me into the upper echelon of the educational blogosphere. In short, I felt that the quantity of readers would directly reflect the quality of my network. To return to the garden analogy, I wanted to transplant myself into a pre-made heirloom garden of specialized thriving plants. I was reading the names I had been told to read. I was following the people I was told to follow on Twitter. I had been sold a perfect network, and I thought that all I had to do was sit back and let the learning community sweep me away.

The conference taught me that, I can read well-known bloggers, I can even sit with them in a room and discuss the echo-chamber, but to truly feel the power of the network I have to plant my own garden and tend it religiously. It is not enough to simply use twitter to get to know someone, you need to meet them, and laugh over Chinese food, take a walk in Golden Gate park, share a cab. This conference proved that I don’t need to be connected to the network, or a network, but that it is more important that I build my own functioning network of like-minded teachers and students.

“Audiences drive by while communities drop in.”

As Clarence’s quote elucidates, I learned that it is not enough to simply copy and paste the nodes of a generic network and expect it to be fruitful. We must build communities. This takes time. This takes honesty and passion. This takes effort and patience. This takes dedication and hard work.

“You write where people care! Small passionate communities matter.”

I am sure hundreds of blog posts have already been written about what Learning 2.008 meant to the various participants. What do I have to say that is any different? What do I have to say that is relevant or meaningful in anyway? These are questions I often find myself asking myself as I blog. The longer I swim around educational blogs, the more I realize that I am not as intelligent as I like to think. People articulate their thoughts more effectively than me; people write better than me, people comment more insightfully than me. In short, I often feel that the network would be fine without my little musings in this tiny corner of the Internet, which I have etched out for myself.

So why do I bother? I may not have the credentials or the talent, but after talking with teachers from around the world at this conference, I realized that I do have some things to say that others want to hear. This is the beauty of the network. Day in and day out I am threading my own narrative and trying to somehow tie it to others. I am carefully and deliberately tending my garden.  Leaving Tweets about music and politics, never afraid to stand behind my ideas, using a raw and honest voice with an infectious enthusiasm, posting videos to youtube and photos to Flickr, I will keep sowing my seeds in my corner of the Web. Sometimes in a whisper, sometimes through a roar, I will wait patiently hoping that my tribe will find their way to my doorstep and together we will move forward.