Traditionally teachers at conferences either did not take notes or they took notes on paper. If they didn't take notes, then they probably did not remember some of the "good stuff" they were exposed to. If they did take notes, that information was usually just available to them.

More recently people have been taking notes on laptops. This at least made it easier to share with others, but those others were usually people they knew or people back in their school district. For the past 5-8 years some people were posting their notes to a blog, so that the information was available to others. The problem with this was that you needed to know about their blog before you could benefit from their notes. And this was usually "after the fact" and did not allow for any conversation other than adding a reply to the blog post.

There are many reasons to Tweet your notes when you are at a conference. Usually there are agreed upon hashtags such as #FETC and #ISTE2010 and #TIES2009 to add to your tweets. Anyone who knows what the hashtag is can follow all the Tweets from that conference. 

Recently I have followed Tweets from conferences at TIES in Minneapolis and FETC in Florida (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23fetc). The Tweets from TIES are old enough that Twitter Search won't retrieve them, but I archived all the Tweets with the #TIES2009 hashtag using TwapperKeeper - http://twapperkeeper.com/ties2009/

Often people attending the same session or keynote at a conference can carry on a conversation about the presentation even though they don't know each other and may be sitting in other parts of the audience. Last year several of my staff members were in Florida for FETC. While they were in a keynote presentation by Hall Davidson I was watching via uStream back in my office in North Dakota and conversing with them via Twitter about his presentation.

I plan to be at ISTE 2010 in Denver this summer and will be checking on Tweets from others that are there to see what they are learning, things they have seen at the exhibit booths, and maybe meet some of them in the evening to continue the conversations face-to-face.

Craig Nansen
Director of Technology
Minot, ND 58701
@cnansen
[email protected]