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.

Twitter as an Assessment Tool: NECC 2.0 Session TODAY at 1PM EST

At 1PM EST today, I'm going to be leading a virtual session on the topic: 'Twitter as an Assessment Tool'.

This will take place in Virtual Room A in the NECC 2.0 Elluminate Rooms. To take part, follow this link and scroll down to the sessions.

Click on 'Virtual Room A' and sign into the room.

If you have not used Elluminate before, you'll need to download the browser, but it's painless and well worth the time.

We'll be talking about using Twitter in assessment as a lifeline, for review sessions, as a collaborative bibliography tool, for collab assessment, using Twitterfall in open tests, and using Twitter to vet class Wikis.

Hope to see you there.

The Other Side

There's a whole 'other' world at NECC, you know.

It's the world there just below the physical reality of the convention center. Some folks are tuned into it, others will have left the conference never having been aware of its existence.

It's the virtual world of NECC Unplugged.

Since Monday, there have been over 40 presentations in the Elluminate Live Room as well as through the virtual rooms and live feeds. They've covered various topics not readily available elsewhere at NECC such as a 'research 2.0' demo of Diigo, an intro to Sugar Lab's open source collaborative learning platform, a wiki roundtable with Adam Frey from Wikispaces, as well as hands-on sessions explaining how to actually USE social media of all sorts in a classroom setting.

I'll be spending this, the final day of NECC 2009, exploring the virtual side.

Morning Update from NECC 09

Educational Insanity has a nice argument against Malcolm Gladwell's form of inductive reasoning right here.

And McLeod has links to four separate liveblogs written last night during the keynote.

I had a terrible nightmare last night in which Mr. Gladwell pummeled me with a rolled up copy of the New Yorker whilst recounting the day-by-day antics of Mick Fleetwood and company circa 1969.

Back to reality.

Starbucks' line is now 50+ deep. I scored a free cup of joe behind-the-scenes. When it comes to coffee, I don't stand in line; see me for tricks of the trade.

I'm headed down to the exhibition floor. Will be blogging throughout the day. Let the games begin!