Around the world in three days

The Reform Club is the London gentleman's club to which Victorian adventurer Phileas Fogg returns after his fictional epic, and highly entertaining journey around the world in 80 days. Jules Verne's hero made it back in time and against all odds, to claim his reward of £20,000. The Reform Club is still there, and ironically, it hasn't changed all that much since the days of Jules Verne. But reform is here and there are some changes being made in the world of education.

This week, the Reform Symposium will take us around the world again, three times in three days as it launches its third global conference. The expected 8,000 participants will be located around the world across all 24 time zones, enabling the conference to be virtually non-stop between Friday 29 - Sunday 31 July. That in itself is quite an awesome concept. Billed as a worldwide e-conference, and boasting a schedule of more than 75 presentations, invited panels and 12 keynotes, the Reform Symposium promises to be an event of huge significance for the education world. One teacher on Twitter said today that they looked forward to learning some new things while still in their pyjamas (I won't mention their name...)

Lots of tweeps are sporting the REFORM logo around the edges of their profile pics and David Wees has created a Twitter list of all the organisers and presenters for the symposium, all adding to the building excitement. The great line up of keynote speakers for RSCON3 includes Alec Couros, Steve Hargadon, Paula White, George Couros, Chuck Sandy, Jo Hart, Pamela Burnard, Steven Anderson, John Davitt, Terry Freedman and Phil Hart. I am delighted to have been invited to give the closing keynote address on Sunday at 2200 hours (British Summer Time). You can work out your own timezone for any presentation throughout the three days simply by going to the Reform Symposium site and using the excellent timezone tool. Some of my audience may well be in a state of undress, but I will be wearing my best suit and tie (as the pigs land for refuelling) to present from the confines of my home office, using my faithful laptop Nigel, and my Elluminate headset.

Expect the Twitter stream to go crazy, as this week the Reform Symposium takes us around the world in 3 days. See you online!

Image by EraPhernalia


Around the world in three days by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.