Celebrate Excellence in Education: Nominate Outstanding Educators by April 15!
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Going to Canvascon has always been a highlight of my summer, at least since I went to the first conference back in 2011 that was held up at Snowbird, outside of Salt Lake. I haven't missed one since then and hope I never do. As the Canvas world has grown over the years, Canvascon has correspondingly grown and changed a lot since that first event up at the ski lodge. To say that things in general have changed a lot in 2020 would be a massive understatement. In just about ten days Canvascon 2020 will kick off, totally online this year, at 10 AM on October 15th. Actually this will happen three times at 10 AM - first in Sydney's time zone, then in London, and finally in Salt Lake City.
One of my favorite aspects of Instructurecon is Hack Night. At the first conference there wasn't any formal programming one evening and a few people gathered in the darkened corners of the main lodge to work together on common challenges. This has grown into an event that usually happens on Wednesday nights where anyone is welcome to come talk about anything that interests them. We have people come to collaborate on very technical challenges, all the way over to people who heard about Canvas last week and are desperate to sponge up as much as they can. Lots of Canvas engineers participate. Another favorite of mine is Unconference, which usually happens on the Friday after the rest of the conference and is also open to everyone. @kona is our master of ceremony. If you don't know about unconference, search the community for more info. It's super cool.
So how will we do something similar this year in an online format? We will do our best is what we will do! Canvascon will kick off with 2.5 hours of keynote addresses. After that attendees will have options to attend various live partner and product "hall" events. User interface wise I am told that attendees will see a map with various buildings on it that they can choose to click into.
When they click into a building it will look something like this:
Users can then 'sit' at a table by double clicking it. Once you have sat down you can video and/or text chat with the other table sitters. You will also have a shared whiteboard. Each table will have a topic. There will be multiple floors per building but the table topics will be the same for each floor.
CALL TO ACTION TIME!!!!
We need to decide what the table topics should be. Please suggest ideas in the comments on this question. We need a one to three word topic title and a short description to put into the whiteboard for people to read as they sit down. Feel free to add a me too! to topics that other people suggest that you also find interesting. Remember, suggested topics can be anything to do with teaching and learning, hacking Canvas, instructional design, community feedback or anything else related to edtech that your heart desires.
By the way, any post about Instructurecon 2011 wouldn't be complete without an image of Josh trying to do a one armed pushup on stage.
I've traditionally hosted a table for open-source and self-hosted Canvas hacking, and would be more than happy to do it at a virtual hack night, even though I lost the sign at hack night 2019 😞
Also, since there isn't a live engineering leadership Q&A panel this year, having some of those folks at a table where we can stop in and pester them about when certain new features will be open-sourced say hello would be nice 😉
Scott, I think a general Data topic is good, just without Canvas Data. We have Canvas Data, but that's a different rabbit hole ...
