We met at Bahen to talk about the upcoming IBM CASCON workshop on
“cool technologies.” Stephen gave us an idea of the kind of demand:
we've got the biggest room, the best machines, and we're doing the
workshop _twice._ I'm _really_ looking forward to evangelizing these
insanely useful tools!

We talked about the structure of the CASCON workshop and how the
topics would flow into each other:

A good lead-in for the workshop would be to have participants add the
following to an introduction thread for the workshop:

– Who are you?
– Why are you here?
– What do you want to get out of the course?
– Link to webpage, etc.

This not only gives them a taste of how easy it is to respond to a
blog, but also gives us plenty of feedback to work into the 3-hour
tutorial.

We want to show them that blogging isn't just about personal journals.
Getting them hooked on topic-related blogs and convincing them to use
project-related blogs or boss-blogs to communicate with others would
be a big, immediate win. Blogs are great as a personal lab notebook,
and wikiblogs would be even more fantastic.

We talked a bit about the use of blogging in universities. The
humanities people really caught on to the idea of blogs. In fact, most
of the activity I'm seeing in the edublogging frontier comes from
English teachers. Isn't that so cool?

For wikis, we want to emphasize the use of wikis for intranet
documentation, because that's another immediately useful big win for
them.

I'll get to evangelize social bookmarking. Yay! Yay! I'm a really big
fan of using del.icio.us to discover new, useful sites.

Next steps: prepare content for the workshop, move the CASCON blog to
the new server, and write content for the blog.