you know you’re at MIT when…

I’m enjoying the MIT5 conference immensely, although it is very distributed – both temporally, with something like 11 parallel sessions – and spatially, with rooms dotted around a few different buildings with no common meeting area (but that’s just the layout of MIT). So catching up with people really relies on micro-coordination using sms, email, IM and twitter, rather than relying on bumping into them at some big shared ‘event’.

John, Axel and I presented our panel this morning and we got some good dynamic discussion out of it. I really meant to blog much more comprehensively about the conference before now, but find I have medium-form writing fatigue after churning out so much stuff this week. But I’m interested in how much I’m communicating about the conference with people far and wide using other modes of communication.

For example, Twitter is being used by a few people at the conference, like Jill and Luca, for micro-annotation of each panel and paper. Although since my Twitter is ‘friends-only’ I tend to use it more for micro-annotating other, possibly less fascinating topics like what i’m eating, who i’m having lunch with, what software I’m mucking around with etc. So it’s interesting to encounter and contribute to all the conference-twittering while persisting with my usual use of the technology.