I’m looking forward to trekking down to Little Rock next month to take part in my first-ever HighEdWeb conference: HighEdWeb Arkansas, or #hewebar11 as it is known on Twitter.
The conference will be held July 21-22 at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock’s William H. Bowen School of Law. If you haven’t registered yet, there’s still time. You have until July 8 to register.
Since my job focus is not strictly “the web” (whatever that means nowadays), I hadn’t given too much thought to attending a HighEdWeb event. (Also, when your university restricts funding for training during lean times, as ours has since 2008, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about going to conferences.) But I’ve always enjoyed following the proceedings vicariously via Twitter hashtags, and it seems that many of the HighEdWeb presenters are usually people I follow and interact with on social media. Thanks to the persistence of conference co-organizer Shelley Keith, who assured me the planning team was looking to broaden the sessions to include more marketing and strategic communication topics, I submitted a proposal to present.
My proposal was accepted, and so I now have the pleasure of presenting my session, Blogging for a Change, at the end of the final day. That means I and two other presenters — John Rogerson and Jon Wilcox — will be the only things standing between our fellow conference-goers and the evening social event.
The conference has a great lineup of presenters. I’m especially looking forward to hearing from Georgy Cohen of Tufts University and co-creator of Meet Content. Georgy will deliver the keynote, Once Upon a Semester: Storytelling as a framework for Higher Ed web marketing. But mainly, I’m looking forward to learning, getting reacquainted with a couple of folks I’ve met offline and finally getting to meet several I’ve talked to only via social media.
Will I see you in Little Rock at #hewebar11? I hope so. Drop me a line so I’ll know to look for you there.
Higher Ed Marketing 