Perhaps, the most important learning I took home from Podcamp Western Mass is how much a connectivist/rhizomatic perspective aligns with my own thinking. There are two different areas where this struck me.

It felt like Podcamp Western Mass, at least for this year, drifted into presentations to entrepreneurs wanting to learn about social media. I made a tweet to that effect and a person from a non-profit commented it felt that it was too business related and not general enough. How does this relate to rhizmomatic learning? In the first week, we focused on our learning subjectives. Where are we coming from? At Podcamp, this year, it felt very focused on learning objectives. Where do you want to be at the end of the session?

I guess I approach Podcamp from a learning subjective orientation. I go to Podcamp because I want to learn something new, something I don’t know about yet.

Perhaps the most exciting thing I learned about was TechSpring in Springfield. Hopefully, I’ll make it up to some of their events. There big event in May starts the same day that a conference on poetry and church life ends at Yale, so I may go from one to another for an interesting transition.

This brings me back to #rhizo15. It was great to make a couple interesting new connections, and renew some old connections at PodCamp. In many ways, I’ve often considered the success of a conference in terms of the number of new people that I start communicating with on social media. We’ll see how the connections from this year’s podcamp flourish.

Other random stuff. There was a good session on eBook publishing. References to Smashwords, BookBaby, CreateSpace, Kindle Direct Publishing and others. Of particular interest is the idea of using books, and particularly online eBooks, as promotional items.