I spent the last few days out in Milwaukee, for my first journey to HighEdWeb. Wow. Just wow. It was great to meet so many of you in person, and to see so many old friends in one place! I wish I had had more time to spend with all of you.

I’d heard it for years, but this is definitely the premiere web conference in higher ed (and now I’ve been to just about all of them and feel like I can make that judgement!).  From start to finish, this was a very well done event. Everything from the presentations to the more social aspects of it…it was everything I could ever expect from an event and has surpassed my previous “favorite conference ever” choice of An Event Apart. It’s not easy to outdo Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, but the conference committee did it in spades.

My favorite speakers of the conference were Tony Dunn, Kevin Prentiss, Mark Greenfield, Paul Gilzow and Michael Fienen.  Unbelievable job guys. But everyone else I saw were awesome too. This group is one the ball! But that makes me sad too, because I know that so many of them don’t get the respect they deserve from the schools they work at. That means there’s so many good ideas and enthusiasm and knowledge that is going to waste because of internal politics and egos. I may be a bit cynical, but I’m not sure that higher ed deserves this group. Having recently made the jump from working for a college to working for a vender full time, I’ll say emphatically that I feel much more professional fulfillment as a vendor, but I still get to do the type of work for colleges that I like. Maybe it’s something for you guys to consider?

One thing I’ll say is that I still feel like I’m starving for a conference that addresses more advanced web marketing issues. Maybe higher ed isn’t there yet? Any suggestions?

I’m sure by now, many of you will have heard about the great Twitter revolt of 2009. Yes, it got ugly, and as a speaker that stuff scares the crap out of me, but it was well-deserved commentary. I was eating lunch with my fellow .eduGuru writers, and we were planning to leave the keynote entirely to have a blog meeting, but then we saw the title slide. It had an awesome drop shadow, used a 1990s powerpoint design and was pale yellow on white. I commented “we can’t leave….this is going to be a train wreck.”

And so it was. People who weren’t at the conference, but followed it on Twitter, have given this group a bit of flack for going after him so harshly. But they weren’t there. This is a great group of people and they don’t go after someone like this without provocation. I don’t believe that it’s wrong to be on Twitter while you’re listening to a presentation. I also don’t believe that we, as an audience, should revere speakers like they are super-human. They are being paid to help us and if they take that money, and don’t do their job, there should be consequences. Twitter, and tools like it, give the power to the audience. Maybe it will encourage speakers to pay more attention to doing a solid job, and really meeting needs.

Finally, an extra special thanks to Paul Gilzow for pulling a Kanye in my presentation :-)

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