NECC 2008 Reflections & Overview

I have started this blog post over and over again several times — and once more I am starting over from scratch. NECC was just so overwhelming and so full of rich experiences for me personally that as I have attempted to put it all into words it has just come out as a jumbled mess.

I’m going to try a simpler approach this time…

NECC was wonderful.

The face-to-face meetings — the hugs, the rich discussions at the conference or over dinner, the shared learning & shared understandings — were all simply amazing to me. I didn’t get to talk with everyone that I wanted to in as much depth as I would have liked — but the conversations that I did have with so many brilliant people were incredibly rich and have really pushed my own thinking about the work that I am trying to do in this blog as well as in my day-to-day work/life.

I can’t list everyone that I connected with at NECC in this blog post because I will most certainly leave someone out. Trust me, I tried doing that in some of the previous drafts of this post! But I will say to all those that I met, conversed with, shared dinner or lunch with — Thank You for making my NECC 2008 experience so much fun and so meaningful!

I wasn’t a bothered by Pearson’s presence at EduBloggerCon as some people were — but that’s just me. I was bothered by the wifi situation, but I know that all of us were putting a great strain on that resource so it is hard to fault the convention center or ISTE for that.

I realized that I have lost patience for the exhibit hall. I felt frustration seeing booth after booth trying to sell packaged versions of tools that we can all use for free on the web. I didn’t stay there very long.

I loved the Blogger Cafe, but I didn’t experience it last year so I can’t compare the older version with this year’s version. I agree that NECC Unplugged should be nearby, but separate.

I would like to see more of us (edubloggers) reaching out to the many educators who attend NECC and other tech conferences but who are mostly unaware of how to incorporate Web 2.0 into their classrooms. As I listened to/read the wrap-up session facilitated by Steve Hargadon, I kept thinking about an idea for “topic tables”. What if we had a space set aside with a few tables that could be identified by concept or tool where “newbies” could meet one-on-one with some of us (serving as mentors — maybe in one or two hour shifts) to discuss uses or get hands-on help setting up tools/accounts for use in the classroom. It’s just a thought… my thought… and I know that is probably too structured for some people. I do see that idea as one solution for educators who are new to this to engage with those of us who have been exploring these tools/strategies for quite a while.

On that note… While I continue to stress the need for more of us to become more involved in the academic (non-tech) conferences, this year’s NECC opened my eyes regarding the size of our community. We are tiny. We are a minority. We still have an audience and a purpose at NECC and other tech-conferences. We need more than one “battle front” — we need to be more involved in the tech conference, more involved in the non-tech academic conferences, and we need to be more involved in our local areas with parents and community leaders. We need to be vocal and active advocates everywhere.

I apologize to anyone who wasn’t able to get in to my session. The interest in my topic really shocked me. It also sent a very strong and clear message to me regarding a need for more discussions and more examples of how emerging technologies support/enhance effective research-based pedagogy and student learning. It wasn’t just the enormous crowd who showed up for my session that gave me this message. Chris Lehmann’s session on School 2.0: Combining Progressive Pedagogy and 21st-Century Tools was one of the most popular sessions and someone even asked during the The Magic of Digital: Collaborative Interaction in Teacher Professional Development session, “What about student learning?” We — all of us — need to move beyond just talking about the tools. We need to bridge those connections between what we know works in the classroom and how these tools support that.

I loved EduBloggerCon. (See my reflections from that day here.) I didn’t attend last year, so like the Blogger Cafe I have nothing to compare with this year’s EBC. Yes, it was large. No, it wasn’t as intimate as I would have liked. However, it was still a fun experience and I did learn and share a lot with others that day. Thank you Steve Hargadon for all of your hard work on EBC as well as NECC Unplugged!

There is so much more I could say about NECC 2008, but I think I’ll end this post here and pick up some of those other thoughts — as well as expand on some of the above thoughts — in additional posts over the next week.

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Change Agency by Stephanie Sandifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may copy, distribute, transmit and/or remix this content for noncommercial uses as long as you attribute the work to Stephanie Sandifer (with link back to the original post) and agree to license the work under the same or similar license.