Great Tips on Tweeting and Conferences →

Brian Croxall over at the Chronicle’s ProfHacker blog wrote an article on tips for Tweeting at conferences. Since I have a love for TextExpander (both on Mac OS and iOS) he had a really good tip to speed up the process:[1]

Use text expansion. By this point, you’ll notice that I’ve told you several things should be in each tweet: a conference hashtag, a session hashtag, and a username for the person speaking. You can save yourself a lot of time in tweeting if you make use of text expansion. When a person starts speaking, I create a snippet that looks like this “.@stewartvarner: X #mla14 #s402” and assign it the keyword “twt”. Then, I can simply type twt in my Twitter client and the speaker and hashtags are created automatically.

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1. Also probably speeds up the process of annoying most of the people who follow me.  ↩

Technology has arrived when you no longer think about it

Conferences and iPhone batteries have traditionally not been the best of friends for me. I have owned the iPhone 3GS, 4S and now the 5s. While at conferences, I am usually checking/posting to Twitter, (i)messaging, emailing, looking things up, and using Maps/OpenTable/Yelp to find the best dinner place. The 3GS and the 4S would barely make it mid- to late-afternoon before they were dead.

The solution was usually to hunt for power throughout the day, sneak back to the hotel room to charge up (and catch up with the office) during an afternoon session, or pack an extra battery case.

I picked up the iPhone 5s when it was released back in September and have used it during three different conferences.[1] It has gotten me through the entire day. This despite the three conferences in cities, New York, Las Vegas, and San Francisco, that might have some of the worse cell coverage in the United States.

Running from the 7:00 AM breakfasts to the 1:00 AM last call, often I would be plugging it in with only a few percent of battery left, but I never got that sweat of imminent phone death. The whole time at all three conferences I remained on cellular data because wifi is always so bad at conferences.[2]

Certainly, the camera is great, the speed of LTE is wonderful, and the weight is nothing, but to me, my nearly four months with the iPhone 5s is its ability to get through a full conference day (and night). This is technology getting out of your way to just do what you need to do.

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1. I know three conferences between late September and now is a bit much.  ↩

2. There are difficult problems in this world, but why is it so hard to have good wifi in large public places with many, many people?  ↩

Federal Financial Aid Conference 2013

Just a quick note to mention that I am on my way to the Department of Education’s Federal Financial Aid Conference (formerly known as FSA and now as FSATC).[1] The conference officially starts Tuesday and runs through Friday at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas.

If you will be at the conference, be sure to check out the #FAChat tweetup on Tuesday at 5:00 PM at Ri Ra Irish Pub in the Mandalay Bay. Also, feel free to reach out to me on tweet @scottcline or via email at scott at scottcline.org.

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1. Really, we had to add “Training Conference” to make it sound like the Department of Education is not wasting money on a “party” in Las Vegas?  ↩

College Board National Forum 2013 This Week in New York

Just a quick note that I on my way to the College Board National Forum in New York City that starts Wednesday and runs through Friday.

If you are going to be there, let me know by sending me an email scott @ scottcline.org or on Twitter @scottcline.

If you do follow me on Twitter, it will probably be more active then normal this week with updates from the conference (as well as updates on great meals in New York).

A very clear message about the "Lavish" FSA Conference

The Department of Education opened the registration for the free FSA Conference and the hotel room block yesterday that will take place the first week of December in Las Vegas, NV.

It is not the only thing the FSA updated on the website. Below is the changes in the website today. Cross outs are words that were deleted and yellow highlights are the additions.

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Note the addition of "is not for government employees but it is training provided...by the government", "by law, schools are accountable", and "is an investment in protecting the taxpayer dollars from fraud, waste, and abuse".

Strong and direct language. It might have been in reaction to the articles a few weeks ago about "Education Dept. plans lavish Las Vegas conference as students lose services" and Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn calling the decision inappropriate.