Finishing up my packing for AERA. I’ll be wandering around the convention and the French Quarter, so if you’re in town, send me a tweet.

I’ll be speaking at a couple of sessions related to the Council of Youth Research. You won’t want to miss the kids speaking at the sessions on the poster below:

I’ve been playing around with the AERA mobile application. I appreciate the step forward. It takes a while to load:

There are way too many speakers to make the name and sessions searching very efficient. If anything, I think an app like this misses the social component that I’m expecting from a convention like this. #dml2011 was a huge resource during the Digital Media and Learning conference; I suspect those that weren’t on twitter missed a substantive amount of that conference. Likewise, AERA is trying to move to wireless devices, but lacks the social engagement that would have been easy to embed in the application. Compared to an incredibly smaller sized conference like DML, AERA’s twitter presence is pretty subdued…

AERA President-elect Bill Tierney has some suggestions on weaving through the waves of AERA and is also looking for feedback to improve the conference.

More updates to come!