Daily Archives: October 28, 2007

The following is also shared on the K-12 Online Ning as a forum post, but I’m republishing it here so it’s archived as part of our conference blog.

The 2007 K-12 Online Conference has officially ended, but the learning continues year-round! What a terrific conference we had this year! The statistics on accesses of the main conference website/blog from around the world (via ClustrMaps) absolutely astound me!

The conference blog ClustrMap for the entire world shows that in the month leading up to and including the two weeks of the actual conference, 83,064 different computer IP addresses accessed the website!

ClustrMaps tracks the location of different IP addresses accessing a site, so each one of these access numbers does not necessarily correspond to a different person. Some of these hits are likely spambots, but most of them are likely people! The ClustrMap after day 1 (October 15, 2007) of the regular conference showed 44,056 site visits since September 16th:

Clearly we had a lot of people visiting the K-12 Online Conference website before the actual presentations got underway, and approximately an equal number of NEW visitors to the site once things got started! Last year for the 2006 conference (our initial year) we estimated that 54,000 people participated. That figure was based on an analysis of file downloads from the hosting webserver at the College of William and Mary. We will conduct a similar analysis this year. Based on these formative ClustrMap results, however, it appears safe to say that conference participation was WAY up in 2007!

Breaking down conference participation by continent, we see that participation was heaviest in North America but also distributed around the world on every continent except Antarctica!

The K-12 Online Conference is the largest and most international education event in which I’ve ever participated! It is exciting to see that more people learned about and were able to find the conference online this year. Hopefully the conversations and sharing that will take place in the K12Online Ning and elsewhere in the blogosphere will continue to benefit learners around the world and tangibly bridge the gaps of time and space with separate us as educators.

The “Fireside Chats” and “When Night Falls“ for K12 Online 2007 bring together so many folks from around the globe. A primary goal of the conference was to provide opportunities to connect and hold meaningful conversations around engaged teaching and learning and these “Live Events” became important vehicles in which to do just that.

They would not have occurred without the diligent, hard and creative work of the Live Events Committee. It is so difficult to express how much we appreciate all the energies and time they have put in to make the “live events” possible. The planning, the behind the scenes emails and the wiki building were indeed a group effort. Thank you! The “When Night Falls Flickr Group”, which was Mark’s inspiration, took When Night Falls to the next level; the community loved it! To Vinnie, for your leadership, it wouldn’t have happened without you.

A huge thank you goes to this committee:

Chair- Vinnie Vrotny (http://vvrotny.edublogs.org/)

Member- Darren Draper (http://drapestakes.blogspot.com/)

Member- Mark Ahlness (http://www.halcyon.com/arborhts/mahlness/index.htm)

Member- Rachel Murphy (http://www.ablazeclassrooms.org/blogging.htm)

Willing to help:

Paul Harrington (http://ddraig-goch.blogspot.com/)

Susan Van Gelder (http://susanvg.blogspot.com/)

Joyce Valenza (http://www.sdst.org/shs/library/jvweb.html)

Thank you!!