Lessons Learned from KySTE

1) Since Tuesday I've been in Louisville attending the KySTE conference, and I've learned an important lesson: It's not really possible to help organize and run a large conference AND attend it like a regular attendee. You would think I learned this last year. After all, now that I think back, I had pretty much the same experience last year when I was also helping to run the thing, and I even wrote a post about it. But apparently I thought it would be different this year. I sat down a week or so ago with a list of all of the sessions and their times, and I carefully mapped out what I would attend during each session as a 1st choice and what I would attend as a 2nd choice if the 1st didn't work out or something. And I was very excited about some of the sessions that I was going to attend.


But it's been a day and a half of the conference, and I haven't sat in on a complete session yet! There are just too many other things to do. I DID get to spend some time listening to a couple of sessions presented by Microsoft, but I've missed a bunch of sessions that I wanted and/or needed to go to.


There is ONE session that I'm pretty sure I will attend in its entirety today, and that's the session that I'm presenting about free and legal music that can be obtained on the Internet and used in school projects. I hope at least a few people come to the session. I say that, but honestly, if NO ONE showed up I wouldn't be that upset. It would free me up some time.



2) The second thing I learned this week is that I may need to start separating my social networking sites from one another. Right now I have four social networking sites:

• This blog


• A Facebook account


• A Twitter acount (I actually have two of these, but one is a district account and is for the entire school district)


• A YouTube account.

Right now I have them all linked together. My Twitter account posts to my Facebook page and to this blog. Blog entries from this blog also appear on my Facebook page. And if I load a video to YouTube it automatically appears on my Facebook page, and I usually post it here, too.

All of which is great, but...

...but at KySTE this week a number of people have started following me on Twitter because of my updates on KySTE. Those people don't really need to hear my tweets about my kids or about the fact that I'm hanging out at the pool, and my Facebook friends and family don't need to hear my tweets about some new technology I've found. I'm afraid if I make too many Tweets (which show up as status updates currently) about technology that my Facebook friends may get tired of them and unFriend me on Facebook. I'm going to kind of monitor the situation, but I may find that I need to at least disconnect my Twitter and Facebook, leaving Facebook as a place for "friends" and Twitter as a more professional network.

I'm not going to do anything yet, though.