Chris Betcher

Having just experienced an interesting juxtaposition of two quite different conference modes, I was struck by the following thoughts... I spent most of last weekend putting a presentation together for the k12 online conference.  This virtual conference was started by a small group of teachers and has run every year since 2006. It is composed entirely of online video presentations of up to 20 minutes in length. These videos are presentation of ideas, best practice, classroom examples and big thinking submitted by educators from around the world. Presenters submit proposals just like a conventional conference, and these proposals are vetted by a selection panel for quality and relevance. Selected presenters then produce their 20 minute video and submit it and each year, over a 2 week period, these videos are released publicly.  There are a few live events and such to accompany them over the 2 weeks that the "conference" is running, but importantly these video presentations live...

With Google turning 15 last week, I've been pondering  about just how much friction has been removed from our lives because of technology (and web technology in particular).  Thanks to the web, many things that were once difficult, expensive, complicated or time-consuming have been made less of all of these things, and much of the inherent friction in these things has been dramatically reduced, and in some cases even eliminated completely. This removal of friction hasn't always been painless, and many industries have been decimated by the massive disintermediation that  digital technology has brought to them. Take the music industry as an obvious example.  In the space of about a decade, we've seen a huge shift from the idea of buying music on plastic disks to that of downloading music from "somewhere on the Internet", hopefully by still paying for it with some sort of subscription model like Spotify or Google Play All Access, but all too often pirated for free ...