Alice Mercer's PD Blog » necc

Reflections on NECC 2009 Day One

alicemercer — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:03:57 +0000

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/

The conference formerly known as “NECC”

alicemercer — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:26:53 +0000

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.