The University of Victoria education program hosted an edcamp on November 6th which was my first experience with this type of event. There were students from UVic as well as faculty, local educators, and the UNBC education program first years. Unfortunately, this edcamp was hosted online as an in person edcamp is currently not possible, however some of the advantages of this format were still evident. I very much enjoyed this learning environment which was very casual and comfortable allowing for easy participation in discussion. Having experts on a topic in a group discussion allows the participants to not only benefit from their experience but also be comfortable enough to share unique and new ideas. This allows for a good hybrid between experience and youthful enthusiasm to be shared in discussion allowing fresh ideas to be tempered by experience.
The edcamp format was also enjoyable in that it allows the participants to spent as much or as little time discussing a particular topic as they want. If a discussion is interesting to them, they can continue to participate for the entire session if desired, or if the discussion moves to a topic the find less interesting, they can move on to a new group. I found that this format encourages very natural and organic choice of topics and discussion path, and rather than forcing the topic through a set discussion, as in a presented PowerPoint lecture, it allows the group as a whole to choose the direction of thoughts. One disadvantage because of this is that there can be no true predetermined take home message presented as in traditional ProD sessions, but instead the key points of the session are whatever the participants found most important.
At this particular edcamp most of my time was spent in a discussion room talking about the use of personal electronic devices in classrooms. The open style of discussion was quite useful for this topic as it allowed the conversation to touch many topics that I may not have otherwise thought about. This included various classroom methods that teachers use to manage personal device use, possible classroom uses of technology, some of the drawbacks of using personal devices, legislation around phone confiscation, the psychology around personal device usage, and many more topics. I found this session highly interesting and could have spent all afternoon discussing it in this format, and look forward to any future opportunities to participate in edcamps.