Grokin’ Talk at NECC

The best of San Diego tech event could be the face time

By Kathy Ishizuka -- School Library Journal, 8/1/2006

A provocative keynote address by Nicholas Negroponte on the highly anticipated One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project was among the features of the 2006 National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) held in San Diego, CA, July 5–7. Yet it was good, old-fashioned human conversation that had the greatest take-away value, according to attendees who blogged about the event.

The annual NECC, sponsored by the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE), attracted 12,000 registered attendees and several thousand exhibitor personnel this year, according to the Daily Leader, ISTE’s conference publication. With an overarching goal of “charting an intentional future” of technology’s role in learning, the conference reached the organization’s projected numbers, despite occurring on the heels of the July fourth holiday.

The usual exhaustive roster of NECC workshops, poster, and other sessions covered the gamut of education technology, from access issues and open source to digital storytelling and visual literacy. “Every day there were plenty of ideas that I could take right into my classroom,” said Mary Goold, a first-grade teacher at Mary Washington Elementary School in Pocatello, ID, who attends NECC annually, along with her husband, Larry, a library media specialist at Pocatello High School.

Also featured were presentations by Alan November, David Warlick, Will Richardson, Bernie Dodge, and Kathy Schrock, among other prominent figures in the education technology sphere. But perhaps the most anticipated speaker was Negroponte. The chair of the MIT Media Lab drew a crowd of 6,000 at the July 6 keynote, where he delivered the latest news on the high-profile OLPC initiative. Also known as the $100 laptop project, the effort intends nothing less than to transform education worldwide by distributing portable, Internet-wired computers to children in underdeveloped countries. Attendees were then treated to the first public display of the candy-colored orange prototype, and a select few will be invited to participate in OLPC’s developer program.

However, NECC’s exhibit hall, stocked by 486 vendors, was off-putting to some. Lamenting the “overdone, glitzy booths” in his blog, Richardson noted the apparent disconnect between product-centered vendor efforts and what educators are trying to achieve in the classroom. What was exciting, wrote Richardson, was sharing ideas with blogger colleagues, particularly about Web 2.0 applications. Warlick concurred on his blog. “Hands down, the best thing about NECC this year was the conversations.”

Teacher and fellow blogger Eric Langhorst of Liberty, MO, stalked the halls at NECC, collecting interviews to podcast. To his delight, “Not a single person asked me what a podcast is,” he said. “That is real progress.”