Educational Insanity

I blogged.

About NECC.

For the fine folks at Dell.

Check it out there.

I attended CoSN’s annual conference in Austin, TX this week.  I’m glad I went, though my impressions from the conference are mixed.

What I liked about the CoSN conference:

• Serious - the overall tone/climate of the event is, IMHO, very serious.  I mean that in a good way.  The tone stands in stark contrast to some of the larger conventions that long ago crossed the line of professionalism.  There were  no costumes or gaudy theme decorations at this conference, thankfully.
• Location – the weather in Austin sucked.  That said, I’d always wanted to go to Austin and the little of it I saw was appealing.  I’m sick of the Orlando, SF, New Orleans conference scenes.  This was a nice change for me.
• Focus – there were a few sessions that were about tech. tools and/or pedagogy, but there was definitely more of a focus on bigger policy issues.  I’m cool with that.
• Opening keynote – though he seemed a bit cranky, I thought Don Tapscott’s presentation worked.  I’ve not read any of his books, but I like that he writes and speaks from evidence.  He’s done the research necessary to make the claims that he does. [NOTE: I had to leave before the Christenson/Horn keynote, so I don't know how that went.]

And, here’s what I didn’t like:

• Facility – the conference used the 4th and 6th floors of a Hilton hotel.  That was fine, but there were very few spaces to sit outside of the rooms.  The hallways were long and wide spaces that didn’t lend themselves to convening and chatting.  It just felt cold and lonely in the facility.   Also, without an air card, wireless Internet access cost $10.95/day.  Not a huge expense, but tech. conferences should freely open the cloud to the attendees.
• Sessions – nothing meaningful can happen in 45-minutes. Just about every session I attended had to end abruptly and lacked speaker/audience interaction because the speakers took the whole time.
• Lack of diversity – this continues to infuriate me.  The attendees at this conference made the NECC crowd look like a rainbow and that doesn’t say much.
• Cost – this was an expensive event to attend.  On top of that, it seemed like there was a lot of nickle-and-diming going on.  When I heard that CoSN would be making the final keynote available on the Web on a pay-per-view basis, I nearly choked to death.

As usual these days, the real value of the conference was in the face-to-face conversations that happened before, between and after the sessions.  I met some of the folks in my Twitter network and a host of new educators.  And, most importantly, I had some real Texas BBQ!

No point in re-creating the wheel, so I’ve copied the e-mail I sent to my faculty colleagues below (he only difference is that I embedded my teaser video into this post instead of just providing a link):

***

Dearest colleagues,
If I told you that there is an extraordinary educational conference that you can attend at no expense to your travel budget, (or to any other budget, for that matter) and that you could attend largely at your own convenience, you’d listen, right?

Well, beginning on October 13 and continuing through the end of the month, the K12 Online Conference 2008 will be taking place…well…everywhere and anywhere.  As it is written on the homepage of the conference:

The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2008 conference theme is “Amplifying Possibilities”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 13, 2008. The following two weeks, October 20-24 and October 27-31, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations.

To learn more about the conference, I would suggest reading and clicking through this site. Basically, though, presentations are made via prerecorded videos and broadcast at specific times.  There are also opportunities to “meet” and “talk to” the presenters at a webinar called a Fireside Chat.

The schedule of events can be found here.  You will notice that yours truly is one of the select presenters and my presentation airs on Tuesday, October 21 at 12:00 p.m GMT (which, if I’m correct, is 8:00 EST). You can view a “teaser” of my presentation [below], and teasers for many of the other presentations are being added to the conference blog every day.

I can’t recommend this conference enough, and please pass along this information to your students.  This is a FREE conference FOR educators BY educators.  It is a 21st Century conference about 21st Century teaching and learning.

Thanks for considering this extraordinary learning opportunity and I hope to “see” you at the fireside chats!

Yours,
JB

 I’m leaving tomorrow morning for the annual conference of the Virginia Society for Technology in Education (VSTE), my new home state’s affiliate of ISTE.  I’m looking forward to networking and getting the lay of the ed. tech. landscape across the Commonwealth.  I’m certainly discouraged about the following facts from the 80 page program of the largest ed. tech. conference in VA:

• The program contains not one single mention of the word “principal” (or, therefore, AP). 
• Over 100 sessions and only ONE contains the word leadership in the title. 
• There are 11 sessions dedicated to the “leadership strand,” but they range in topics from digital safety to “using pivot tables in EXCEL to analyze SOL data” (I kid you not; that’s part of the leadership strand).

Still, it’ll be good to learn some cool new tricks.  I hope to report from there.