News & Views
An educational computing conference with a difference
By Terry Freedman
Mon, 18 Feb 2008, 07:24

I report on a conference in the USA he attended and at which I presented.

“Help! I don’t even know how to begin!”

The plaintive cry of someone confronted with the latest interactive video game? The heart-felt whimpering of someone who has just been given a critical assignment by their boss (just as he’s leaving for the golf course)? Not exactly. What you’ve just read is a description of how yours truly felt when looking at the programme for last year’s National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in the USA.

A matter of size

Like a lot of educationalists I go to quite a few conferences, mostly in the UK. These conferences vary in size and content, of course, but the largest I’ve been to had around 700 delegates – unless you count the exhibition-cum-conference known as the BETT show, which is held in the second week of January each year. That attracts several thousand people from all over Britain and around the world. But in terms of a residential conference, NECC beats them all hands down.

So, before getting into the detail of the conference, let me try to paint a picture. The conference programme itself is not for the faint-hearted, because the choice, at least at first sight, is almost overwhelming. There are literally hundreds of alternative presentations you could attend all at the same time (known as “parallel” sessions). And that’s not counting all the other things you could be doing, like hanging out in one of the watering holes, or indulging in an off-the-cuff presentation (I’ll come back to that in a moment), wandering around the local area or lying down in a darkened room.

The number of delegates is pretty staggering: over 13,500. To put that into some kind of perspective, that’s over 19 times the size of the largest English conference I’ve attended.

Why attend?

But this isn’t a numbers game. It’s not easy for teachers and other educationalists to get time off to attend a conference. What’s more, it happens in June, ie pretty much at the tail end of a long school year. So why do people go?

Like any conference, there’s a mixture of motives. Some people want to find out what the latest thinking is on a particular topic. Or maybe you want to bone up on your presentation skills. Finding out – and trying out – the latest hot products is a good reason to be there too (the exhibition hall is, as you might expect, massive). And, of course, there is the biggest reason of all: networking. Of the human kind, that is.

Ease of communication at NECC was certainly not an issue, with both online and face-to-face meetings catered for. So, what lessons can be learnt for both conference organisers and conference delegates?

A simple idea to facilitate networking

Think “conference”, think “IT”, and you're inevitably led to think “wireless”. But online access is just one aspect of communication. Necessary, one might say, but not sufficient. But how do you facilitate real life conversation in a sea of 13,000+ delegates? The answer, or one of the answers, perhaps surprisingly, was a bloggers' café.

This turned out to be something of a misnomer: it wasn't a café. In fact, it wasn't anything, except a few dozen easy chairs and a few high tables with stools – and plenty of sockets. But it was this unprepossessing space that rapidly grew into the place to be.

Meaning what, exactly?

Well, on a fairly basic level, it became apparent very quickly that if there was someone you wanted to meet up with, perhaps someone whose blog you've been reading for a while, you'd stand a reasonably good chance of seeing them if you made a point of being there now and then. That is quite some achievement, given the kind of numbers I mentioned earlier.

Throughout the conference there was wireless internet access, not just in the corridors but in the rooms too. This was taken advantage of by people in sessions in a new way. As well as blogging about the session (a practice known as “live blogging”), people communicated with others in the session via Skype and Twitter.

I didn't even avail myself of all the facilities. There were two possibilities that I thought were conceptually quite outstanding. One was the invitation to set up meetings of like-minded people, outside of the formal sessions but away from the informal setting of the bloggers' cafe. The other was the dotting around the conference centre of a number of interactive whiteboards and clusters of chairs. They were there for anybody's use: you could just come along, plug your laptop in, and start waxing lyrical about something or demonstrating how to use a wiki, and address the gathering crowd. A little like a miniature version of London’s Speakers' Corner, what a great way of allowing spontaneity to happen.

For me, the most successful aspect of the conference was that it enabled me to meet lots of people in real life who I’ve known for some time in virtual life. I also enjoyed running a poster session, with the assistance of Peggy George, to whom I’ll introduce you in a moment. A poster session is one where you have a table, computer with an internet connection and a backdrop on which to pin, erm, posters, for two hours. My session was about the development of a free e-book called Coming of Age: an introduction to the new worldwide web.

Others’ opinions

So, what did other people make of the conference?

Peggy George, a retired Lecturer at Arizona State University and a former Elementary Principal of 25 years, agrees that communication was a key factor. (See her article tomorrow too.)

“One powerful “aha” moment for me in this conference”, says Peggy, “was when I observed many well-known web 2.0 technology leaders and experts participating actively in other presentations in order to learn more. They weren’t just there to present and share their own expertise, but to collaborate and interact with others to expand their own knowledge and experience.”

She continues:

“The best part of it all is that the learning and collaboration doesn’t stop with the end of the conference but continues every day after through the access provided to so many of the handouts, presentations, websites, blogs, podcasts and wikis that continue to be available throughout the year.”

That’s a point taken up by Steve Hargadon:

“I think conference organizers are naturally going to be wary of Web 2.0 technologies, and worried that they will do away with the need to attend physically. I think the exact opposite is going to happen. I think that the technologies will actually increase the value of the conferences and the face-to-face engagement.”

Steve is the project director for the CoSN K-12 Open Technologies Initiative, a blogger on educational technology, and the founder of the Classroom 2.0 social network.

But is there a danger of a conference becoming too big? Vince Jansen, an education consultant in Quebec, sounds a cautionary note:

“I think NECC is too commercial and even political, which has pushed student and teacher classroom practice to the periphery. Still, I was quite impressed by some student robotic demonstrations I saw, which clearly highlighted the ingenuity, creativity and collaborative effort of student teams even though it was hidden down the hallway of the exhibition area!”

Talking of the exhibition area, what was new and cool at this year’s show that perhaps we in the UK need to be looking out for? Vince again:

“On the exhibition floor there were two distinct flavours for this year’s conference, personalised education services and edu-gaming. Gaming software were mainly targeting the mathematics or science fields. There certainly was a strong multimedia presence and use of video, but I did not see many viable “new apps” that could contribute significantly in classrooms within the current year.”

You can read more of Vince’s thoughts on the worldwide web.

For Brian Crosby, author of the Learning is Messy blog and fourth grade teacher at Agnes Risley School in Sparks, Nevada, USA, the best thing since sliced bread is Pocketcaster. He writes:

“Pocketcaster software, which is a free download, allows your mobile phone to stream live video to their website where it is archived. Then you can put your clips together later to make a video project.”

I have to say, this looks pretty good. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to try it out for myself because my own phone isn’t supported at the moment. Therefore I am unable to tell you if we in the UK will be able to avail ourselves of the service. On the other hand, there is nothing to suggest we won’t be able to.

How about those hundreds of presentations I mentioned earlier? For Brian Grenier, the “gosh!” moment was, in his words, to do with the role of librarians in schools.

“I was really surprised to hear so much talk about, and attend a number of sessions on, the need for our libraries to rethink their roles in our schools. The librarians themselves are driving this kind of thinking. I was especially impressed by a talk by Doug Johnson on the subject.”

As the Technology Site Coordinator at El Paso Independent School District, Brian was also interested in attending sessions about the “new” students in our schools and what their demographics means to educators. Presumably kids in the USA are, like their counterparts on this side of the pond, incredibly tech-savvy, adept at multitasking and multi-conversing, supremely comfortable with any new device that comes out on the market and, above all, very happy to share their thoughts with people they hardly know, and have never met, through social networking sites like Facebook.

Vinnie Vrotny is the Director of Academic Technology and is at the North Shore Country Day School, in Winnetka, Illinois. For him, a presentation called “Rock our World: Global Awareness Across the Curriculum” by Anne Reardon, and one by Sharon Peters, called “Online Collaborative Learning for High School Students, A Blended Approach”, were the ones that stood out. It was about being mentally stimulated:

“I enjoyed the fact that the presenters challenged my thinking and notions about collaboration.”

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, who publishes the 21st century learning blog, spoke to many teachers at the conference (and recorded their thoughts). She says:

“Tennyson the poet says we are a part of all we have ever met; if that is true I am such a better person having attended NECC. I can't wait until next year.”

So, in conclusion: NECC was exhilarating, exhausting, exciting and – sorry, I can’t think of any more words starting with “e”. So I’ll let Vince Jansen have the last word. He reminds us that, beyond all the razzmatazz, just one important fact remains. As he puts it:

“The true impact in learning success is still in the hands of a good teacher.”

To find out more about the conference sessions mentioned here, go to the conference website and use the Program Search facility.

Tomorrow, Peggy George gives her reflections about the conference.

This article first appeared in Computers in Classrooms.

© Terry Freedman Mon, 18 Feb 2008