I’ve gushed about the awesome professional network I’ve come to be connected to – HighEdWeb – many times before. I attended some awesome conferences, and made a great number of friends in the field. It’s a lot of fun.
Part of the coolness of heweb comes from the span of members across the country. Although most are far away, many are within a 50 mile radius. What does that mean? We can meet up outside of conferences! Because we’re nerds, we call it a Tweet Up.
Born from a Twitter conversation, myself and some local heweb-bers met up at Belhurst Castle in Geneva NY for some wine tasting, nice weather, castle viewing, and meeting new people. Life gets in the way, so not many people could attend, but it’s about quality, not quantity.
It was a manageable distance for all of us, and we spent a good majority of the day being together at Belhurst. We had some drinks at the bar, ate some good food, tasted wine, sat out on the dock on the lake, and made promises to meet up again, or see each other at upcoming conferences.
We all have very different life stories, and many of us have only met a handful of times, but we have a fun connection embedded within the work that we do every day. It’s obvious that it’s our passion. We love social media, the web, marketing, awesome content, and higher education; but we also love to stay connected. We learn from each other no matter if it’s over a glass of wine or listening to a presentation at a national conference. That’s what I like the most about heweb.
The night ended, and we all went our separate ways, but as we meandered to the parking lot, we began to brainstorm the next Tweet Up possibility…including alcohol, of course.