NECC 2009: My Conclusion

Somebody bring me my horse.

It's time for this ed tech pilgrim to get up and ride.

Twenty-five posts in three-and-a-half days. Twenty-three pages of text. Over eight-thousand-two-hundred words.

And that doesn't count my live-blogging account of the Gladwell Mac keynote. That alone would add another three pages.

That's a lot of blogging.

Hopefully at least some of it was useful to someone. It certainly was useful to me to do it. Talk about a learning experience. Thinking, writing, posting, disagreeing with yourself.

And then the endless Tweets. Tweets about what? Places and sessions that now only exist in our memories and in our media.

There's meaning in there somewhere. I'll leave that to the real writers to work out. I bet Samuel Beckett would have been a hell of a Twitterer.

As for me, I've come to realize over the last few days that I was made for blogging; it gives me stamina; it defines and distills my thinking. It also challenges me because I am a total obsessive freak and what I blog often explains to me what I think.

That gets me in trouble occasionally.

It also makes me realize: I was made for these times.

***

Thank you to ISTE and ISTEConnects for making this possible. Thank you to the organizers and presenters. Thanks to the real media who put up with me drinking their coffee. Thanks to my fellow bloggers and to all of the folks I met both in real life and in sessions online.

Most of all, thanks to the teachers and students who are the reason all of this happens.

Thank you to my wife MJ for covering for me (and putting up with me).

I've got three elementary schoolers at home and I feel like more than anything I was blogging for them. And they're gonna have a laugh someday when they look back and see how old fashioned we all were.

Thank you Ro, Abe, and Johanna.

Daddy's coming home.