Well, it’s that time of year again!  The NSBA Annual Conference is upon us.  In just a few days, thousands of school board members, school administrators, and others will converge up on San Diego for what promises to be one heck of a program.  This year’s conference has sessions that will help school board members become stronger leaders, streamline their district operations, and improve student achievement.  You can learn more about all of the sessions at the online conference planner. 

If you can’t make it to this year’s conference, there are still great opportunities for you to learn.  Be sure to follow us here at the conference blog to get a sense of what’s happening in San Diego.  You can also check back during our online discussions, which will offer some really great information about the President Obama’s first 75 days in office and what the Roberts Supreme Court means for public education.  See the boxes on the side of this blog to set a reminder to log in and learn.

NSBA and BoardBuzz would like to thank the following bloggers for the time they donated to the blog and the great perspectives they offered on the conference. Thank you!

Andrew C.M. Mizsak
Bedford City School District (Ohio)

Brian Wheeler
Albemarle County Public Schools (Virginia)

Jennifer Abell
Charles County Public Schools (Maryland)

John Boerger
Lake Stevens School District #4 (Washington)

Molly O’Holleran
North Platte Public Schools (Nebraska)

Rich Benson
Mount Prospect District 57 (Illinois)

Rich Parker
South Whidbey School District (Washington)

Terri Sharpp
Lindop District 92 (Illinois)

Tom Reed
Loudoun County Public Schools (Virginia)

Sandra Smith-Jones
Virginia Beach City Public Schools (Virginia)

The concept of Web 2.0 is often misunderstood. The phrase alone suggests an improvement. Advocates suggest that technologies such as weblogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networks, APIs, etc. imply a significant change in the way the web works. And in my opinion, it all began with blogging…

What is a blog? Wikipedia tells us that:

A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging which consists of blogs with very short posts. As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs.

The idea of networks, communities, user-generated content, syndication, and more have all led to the Web becoming a platform—one where collective intelligence and the network effect reign.