Vote for our SXSWi panel "Swarming Plato's Cave: Rethinking Digital Fantasies"

The SXSW 2010 panel picker went live today, so you can now vote for our panel, "Swarming Plato's Cave: Rethinking Digital Fantasies," to appear in the lineup for the Interactive Conference in March. If the panel is approved, I'll be speaking with Will Burdette (Twitter), Jim Brown (Twitter), Trish Roberts-Miller (Twitter), and Jillian Sayre (Twitter).

Here's the panel description from the SXSW site:

Technology has always been packaged with promises of better democracy, media, education, minds, and bodies. An intellectual tradition, from Plato onward, questions whether technology can actually deliver on these promises. Working from—and questioning—this tradition, we will examine how material technology is inextricable from fantasies of an ideal world.

If you're interested in the topic, click through to the SXSW site and vote for us.

"Social Media & Education" panel at THATCamp Austin

Last week I had the chance to attend THATCamp Austin, a regional spinoff of THATCamp at George Mason University.

I was able to attend two thought-provoking panel sessions, and I got to hear about a lot of interesting projects through the dork shorts presentations. You can read a lot about what happened by scanning through the archive of Twitter posts at TwapperKeeper.

I really enjoyed the unconference format. Instead of having the conference schedule determined by the conference organizers, the attendees voted on the proposals they wanted to see. One of these proposals suggested a discussion about the role of social media in educational practice. Below, I've posted some video from this session for those who weren't able to make it.