Open and educative events make me happy in a warm inside fluffy kind of way, I like little better than seeing and hearing people are learning, it’s always been that way, I observe, I monitor and cherish seeing pennies drop.

I’ve been wrapped in an academic cloth for literally years and years and I often wonder where it came from, perhaps watching and listening to mum play piano in Sunday school, or witnessing Dad captaining the rugby team and barking instructions on a Saturday afternoon to a gang of marauders in order to achieve a desired outcome (win), makes little difference where the root of the edu tree stems from it’s planted it’s there.

For me education is a way of life, both personally and professionaly, and I feel strongly about anything which prevents that taking place what ever the platform. Maybe this is one of the reasons I am passionate about our MediaCamps, our strong brand of edu related events where in most cases people gain significant value from. What amazes me about these events more than anything else is the wide-ranging diversity of people that descend to these occasions, there always seems to be an abundance of people who really do have a thirst to learn.

I also actively encourage new migrations, boundaries to be broken, niches to be to burnt, moulds to be morphed, essentially through disparity we all gain in viewing an additional frame of reference. I am committed 100% to keeping that openness and clan melt-down in place. Some of you might know one of my greatest fears is that of Ideological Amplification, but well, I’ve never been a football supporter so, fandom and nerdy evangelising is not ever going to sit well with me. No, what turns me on is people breaking their shackles and learning to walk alone, learning to learn, and more importantly, being able to critically anaylise, critique, and dig into the nuts and bolts of the important aspects of whatever is up for discussion.

The heart of the Roman Empire was The Forum, and yet here we are again in danger of forgetting about whose shoulders we stand on, just about every form of communication that takes place using the Internet can be explained with an academic paper already written and slotted into an ology or ism, so I urge you to continue to think wide and hard, and jump off the “pop bus” now and then and take a look around.

The most recent event (MediaCampLondon number 2 or MCL2) was a shining example of this methodology and I would like to extend my gratitude to SAE Institute London, for sponsoring the event and I also wish to thank everyone that helped on the day, and you know who you are and what you did, I won’t gush here as that’s just too So.Me. but do leave a trace in the comments below so people know who you are eh?

This is the Social Media Mafia, but don’t let the title fool you into thinking we are tribal of nature and singularly self-promotional, we are more like a social virus permeating a place near you soon with tentacles reaching into places that might surprise you.

Might you come along to another event if you can, or run one yourself? – do leave your digital footprint.