Passing Notes Behind the Teacher’s Back at SXSW

In the South By Southwest Intereactive  festival a watershed event occurred during a panel discussion. While the “experts of publishing” talked at the festival  panel a spontaneous discusssion on twitter emerged in the audience. The panelists did not initiate it, and were not involved or for the most part aware of the conversation.

This panelists, who were discussing “New Think for Old Publishers” had relatively little new to say, and seemed clueless about hashtags, for example. But the twitter discussion was spontaneous and reflected a new type of emerging learning that includes the rest of the experts and not just the calcified and coronated leaders. This revolution seems to this blogger to be a metaphor for the creative learning potential for the new web.

The Book Publicity Blog   Booksqaure and mediabistro all have discussions of the dual events. By the way, credit for the title of this post: it was a line from the discussion at the book publicity blog.