This post is a little out of sync to the rest of my blog but I hope it may be of interest to regular readers. I’m off from Sunday to Thursday to the annual Limmud conference. It’s quite hard to explain Limmud conference, I’ll try but I recommend reading this recent article from the Guardian education supplement. Limmud is a Jewish conference attended by over 2000 people each year. Though every session in the day is timetabled it’s not all that formal. Anyone can go to any session they choose and anyone can apply to run a session on pretty much anything they want. At the busiest times of day, in one hour, there can be a choice of 30 sessions to go to on anything from Jewish texts to a masterclass with a musician. See here for a random example from this year’s programme. What’s amazing is not just the diversity of learning opportunities and experiences but also the diversity of participants and of course the fact that it is almost entirely organised, every year, by teams of volunteers. The model has now caught on and has been replicated in over 40 communities worldwide. It is also constantly evolving and improving.
My involvement with Limmud each year has been slightly different. This year I’ve volunteered to give a number of sessions. One on e-tools for education and community, one aimed at building an international network of people to work on e-learning for Limmud conference, one on Israeli politics for beginners (a little side interest of mine) and two networking/support sessions for Jewish teachers.
Overall it’s going to be a busy and I hope fun week. I’ll be linking to some of my session resources here. Apologies for regular readers (if there are any!) looking for articles about e-learning in school. I’ll be categorising the short Limmud posts under the category Limmud so feel free to set your RSS readers to ignore them!
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