News: Cable Green on Open Policy; The Classroom 2.0 Book!; PBS NewsHour Feedback; CUEunplugged; Gaming in Ed Virtual Conference; Podcast with Audrey Watters

This has been an exciting week, and it's only half over! Building on my primary focus this year to build several virtual and physical conferences, you'll see we've set dates for four events below, and have a couple more on the active drawing board. But that's not all...

TONIGHT:

• Join me as I talk tonight with Cable Green from Creative Commons for the FutureofEducation.com interview series. He'll be covering his favorite topic right now, "The Obviousness of Open Policy," and we'll talk about this straightforward proposal to require that government-funded work be released under open licensing. More details, with instructions on joining in the live session HERE.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

• Classroom 2.0 celebrate's it's 5th anniversary in March, and to celebrate we've created a community-sourced Classroom 2.0 publishing project to build a treasury of your best wisdom and practices for using the Web in education. Not just the creation of a book, but also the building of an ecosystem to encourage and provide YOU now and in the future with the opportunity to take new leaps in this world of peer-expertise--and in particular, to becoming a published author. :)  Join the project HERE.
• Are you a "computer-using educator" in the western states? If so, you'll either be attending the CUE conference March 15 - 17, or you should be! No pressure, but this year--like we do at ISTE--we're running a bunch of cool community activities in and around the formal events, including an all-day SocialEdCon (formerly EduBloggerCon) that is now going to be all day on Thursday, the first full day of the conference! We'll also be doing a one-day anyone-can-present series in our own room this year on Friday, and (of course) an all-conference Bloggers' Cafe. Do we dare say it will be more fun than you've ever had at CUE?! More information at http://www.CUEunplugged.com.
• The first-ever, Classroom 2.0 Gaming in Education virtual conference will be April 26th! With intial sponsorship from BrainPOP to get this conference off the ground, it will be in the great spirit of our other inclusive and free conferences that we like to think are game-changers (smile) and bring people together from all over the world. Look for more information and announcements at Classroom20.com.
• The Future of Libraries world-wide conference, Library 2.012, now has dates:  October 3 - 5. Wahoo! Huge thank to the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at San José State University for stepping up to be the founding sponsor again this year! Sign up at http://www.library20.com.
• We've also set dates for the 2012 Global Education Conference:  November 12 - 16. Again, all free, all virtual, and the best fun you can have without sleeping for five days!  http://www.globaledcon.com.
• On the drawing board, and just looking for dates:  a "Search Matters" virtual conference on the importance of search literacy (with a little help from our friends at Google!), and AltEdCon, the first world-wide virtual conference on alternative education:  homeschooling, unschooling, distance learning, etc.

OTHER EVENTS:

• David Loertscher was on the FutureofEducation.com interview series last night to talk about the "learning commons" and about "personal learning environments," and his recordings are posted HERE. Last week we heard from Lee Crockett on 21st-century "fluencies" (HERE). Hundreds of other interview recordings can be found HERE.
• Tomorrow night is an amazing panel on "Personal Learning Profiles" with Lisa Nielsen, Barbara Bray, Kathleen McClaskey, and Shannon Miller. I'm a little behind, but the blog post will appear at http://www.stevehargadon.com later today or early tomorrow!
• Next week, our guests on FutureofEducation.com will be Laurette Lynn ("the unplugged mom") and Alan Blankstein.
• The next Classroom 2.0 Saturday LIVE! show will be February 4th on "Using Evernote in the Classroom" with guest Wiliam Stites. 
• Be sure, if you are going to ISTE this year (June 23 - 26) in San Diego that you consider booking yourself to get in Friday night so that you can attend our 5th-year of what used to be called EduBloggerCon but is now SocialEdCon. Oh, and it's just the start of 5 days of incredible fun all rolled up in a package of alternate and community-led events called ISTEunplugged! Do join us!

EDINCUBATOR:

• Our first teacher/student/educator council in EdIncubator has started! It's the PBS NewsHour, and they are very anxious to hear from you as they build out their teaching materials. Join them HERE. The good folks at PBS are helping us test this service out, and we've got a bit of a waiting list going for other startups and organizations looking to do the same, so be sure to contact me at steve@hargadon.com for more details if this sounds like something you'd like to set up for your organization.

HACK EDUCATION PODCAST:

• If you haven't become acquainted with the cutting and ironic humor of Audrey Watters yet, you just must listen in on our somewhat irreverent look at educational technology each week. The podcast link is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/edtechlive/hackeducation. (Her rant about Apple's misguided education announcement two weeks ago was only exceeded by her thoughts this week about Pearson becoming a sponsor of Startup Weekend edu! Recorded at Science Leadership Academy where we were actually physically together, this week's recording isn't at our normal sound quality level... sorry!)

SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES:

• Many of the free community activities that I bring to you through Web 2.0 Labs are looking for appropriate and authentic sponsorship! Email me if you'd like to support one of the events or activities above.

Have a great week!