Alice Mercer’s PD Blog

Have gone up at: http://inpractice.edublogs.org. Enjoy! Also a post on the “social” scene and how to make the most of it is at: http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/07/06/expanding-your-network/

Larry Ferlazzo pointed out that many readers may have NO idea what a NECC is, and why it’s such a big deal, so I thought I would do a short posts on NECC background. I’ll explain the title of this post at the end.

First, NECC (the National Educational Computing Conference) is an annual conference for the members of ISTE (the International Society for Technology in Education). This is a conference focused on education technology and draws folks from around the world, although most are from the U.S.

It is a big conference. How big? This year had it’s largest turnout, with ~18,000 in attendance (about 4,000 were exhibitor/vendors). The exhibition floor for this year was the size of 5 football fields. Below is a crude triptych panorama of the exhibition floor:

They usually have top name speakers for the keynotes (although not all the attendees will think they are so great). This year we had Malcolm Gladwell, and last year we had James Surowiecki.

Since we were in D.C. and a block from NPR, we had Robert Siegel, moderate a debate on brick and mortar Schools, NPR Technology commentator,  Mario Armstrong, did a post speech Q & A with Gladwell. There was even mention of the conference on APM’s Marketplace for June 29, 2009.

The conference and ISTE are doing a rebrand, and will drop NECC, in favor of ISTE for next year’s conference in Denver, hence the cheeky title of this post. So you will not hear about NECC next year, but will hear it called ISTE instead. Sorry for the confusion, it wasn’t my idea. They wanted it to be more “international”. We’ll see if that extends to having the conference outside the U.S. in the future.

To see what others think and what happened, here are some resources. I will be doing blog posts for the next week or so about my adventures there.

• Flickr Group: necc09

• Channels – ISTEvision Video from NECC
  

• RSS from NECC/ ISTE Nings and Blogs

• NECC Blog Search from Google and Technorati

My reflection post on EdubloggerCon09 can be found at:

EdubloggerCon 2009 Reflections

Links:

My Liveblogging at EdbubloggerCon at NECC

The schedule: http://www.edubloggercon.com/DC+2009+Agenda.

Photos on Flickr tagged ebc09

Photos in the EdubloggerCon Pool

Blog Posts (Google)

Blog Posts (Technorati)

Twitter feed for ebc09 or edubloggercon09

NECC Schedule

This day will largely be spent at Capitol Hill lobbying, so I will be “mobile”. Here is my feed:

My NECC Schedule

Below is my calendar for NECC 2009 | National Educational Computing Conference put on by ISTE which will be starting next week. I will begin my travels to Washington, D.C. on Thursday afternoon with a train ride down to the San Francisco Bay area to spend the night there  before leaving by plane for the Capitol.

I will be live blogging many of the events I attend. The blog will appear at http://inpractice.edublogs.org, but I will likely mirror it at http://mizmercer.edublogs.org and http://mercertraining.edublogs.org.

I will be spending most of Tuesday on Capitol Hill as part of a lobbying effort by ISTE. I will be communicating solely by cell phone that day, so you can follow me at http://twitter.com/alicemercer or http://www.plurk.com/mizmercer.

Other places to find me and my media:

• My Flickr stream

• My Page – NECC Ning

• My Microblog will have informal stuff and postings from my cell

Welcome! We’re going to use this post to “work on” during the session which is schedule at 9:00 a.m. PDT.

Embedding images is easy with a visual editor, but don’t let that code freak you out!

Photo credit: 177 of 365 – blind justice on Flickr