Taste of Tech

“Are you ready?”

I’ve been asked that question at least a hundred times over the last few weeks. I usually respond with a laugh. They’re talking about my Teachers Without Borders - Canada trip, on which I leave tomorrow. I won’t be ready until I get back. If then. The truth is, I don’t know what to be ready for. I’m so far out of my element with this thing that I don’t know what it is that I should be doing to get ready.

But the bags are packed, and I’ve collected everything that I can think of that I might need. Culturally, I’ve given up any hope of attempting to “blend in”. I can’t even blend in with the Canadians, let alone the Africans. I nearly forgot, for example, that today is Canada Day. I’m sure that will get a little better as we go along. The veterans on the team will help, and with a little humor, I’m sure they’ll set me straight. I’ve been told my socks are too white for Africa. We’ll have to do something about that.

Professionally, though, I’m not ready at all. I would like to be much further along with the workshop prep, organization of materials, and general workshop planning. The topics and schedules are still changing somewhat, but I really need to focus on that stuff over the next day or so. While I’m not worried about it all coming together, there’s still some work to do.

But that plane’s leaving in the morning, and I’m going to be on it. And my world is about to change. Ready or not, here I come.

I’m still amazed at the EdTech celebrities that I keep running into. Many of these are people I feel I know because I’ve read their blogs and heard their podcasts and seen their Twitter posts. Here, we have Maria Knee, Cheryl Oakes, Angela Meiers, Karl Fisch, Will Richardson,  Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Kathy Cassidy, Lisa Parisi, and Amanda Marrinan. If you don’t know who some of these people are, look at the things they’re doing online. Build those connections.

Oh, and yes. That’s Robert Seigel from NPR.

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Today, I learned that the ballroom is not necessarily the best place to see a keynote. If you’re in, say, the bloggers’ cafe, you see the keynote, you can talk during the boring parts, and interact with others in real time during the talk. Sure, you can do (some) of those things in the ballroom, too, but it’s a very different atmosphere. It’s informal, yet still serious. Now, if I just would have had my laptop, I might have been able to participate in the online backchannel more effectively.

Here are pictures taken in the blogger’s cafe during Malcolm Gladwell’s presentation tonight.

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In 2005, I attended the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Philadelphia. I had wanted to go for years, but it took a long time for the stars to align to get me there. I was impressed and overwhelmed. After attending our state educational technology conference each year, I thought I had a pretty good idea what to expect. I was wrong. There were 12,000 people in attendance. The breakout sessions regularly had 200 people or more in them. The people presenting were, for the most part, amazing. I was impressed by the size of the conference, the quality of the presentations, and the conference as a whole. I decided then that I need to return as often as possible.

Because of family obligations at the end of June and the beginning of July, there’s a very small window of opportunity for me to attend NECC. Going to San Diego or Atlanta or San Antonio was out of the question. This is the first time I’ve been able to get back to NECC. I’ve been looking forward to it for four years.

So now that it’s so close, why am I so indifferent about it?

Sure, the Africa trip probably has something to do with it. I’m leaving for Africa for the Teachers Without Borders trip right from NECC, and I’ve been a bit preoccupied with that. But I think there’s more to it. Since 2005, I’ve discovered my professional learning network. By participating in EdTechTalk, listening to educational technology podcasts,  reading blogs, and Twittering, I’ve become part of this community of educational technology people. I don’t need to go to a conference anymore to see what people are thinking about and talking about and working on. I see that every day. So there will be lots of sessions on using cell phones in education. There will be lots of netbooks. For some reason, “web 2.0″ and “21st Century Skills” are buzzwords that refuse to die, and they’ll be all over the place. And there will be sessions on professional learning networks, too.

I’m not excited about that stuff. What I am excited about is meeting some of these people I’ve been interacting with over the last few years. There are many people in this community that I interact with on a daily basis, and it’ll be nice to put some faces with the names.

But I wonder if the megaconference has outlived its usefulness. I’m not submitting all of my expenses to my employer for reimbursement for this trip. But if I did, they would pay as much for me to attend this conference as it would cost for the district to pay 15-20 people to attend the K-12 Online Conference. And it’s infinitely more expensive than the free, extraordinarily valuable professional development I get from my network.

So, I’ll enjoy NECC. But I’m not nearly as excited as I thought I’d be.

I used to sign up for free magazines. There were a lot of them — Technology & Learning,  Network World, Presentations, Electronic School, Computerworld. When I was teaching, I’d encourage my students to sign up for them too. I was never at a loss for something to read, and they did a great job of keeping me current with new ideas, trends, products, and technologies. They were my primary source for keeping up.

But times have changed. I learn from my network now. I subscribe to blogs, and use Twitter and Digg and Delicious and EdTechTalk to keep up. While I used to grab a magazine while eating my lunch, now I’m more likely to fire up the feed reader or listen to a podcast. So I stopped subscribing to the magazines.

But that doesn’t stop them from coming. Over the last few years, my standard practice has been to put magazines in a pile in case I want to read them later. I typically glance at the covers. They have great content. They’re probably very valuable. I see articles on RSS, developing professional learning networks, making global connections, the risks of using social networking tools in the schools, 1:1 programs…. The content is undoubtedly very good. But I’ve moved on. So every year, at the end of the year, I take the pile of magazines that I’ve been meaning to read and move them over to the recycling bin.

This year’s crop was smaller than usual — only 22 magazines, with six different titles. But it still makes me feel bad, both because I don’t get around to reading them, and because the publishers keep sending them.

Next year, I’ll start another pile. Or maybe I’ll just recycle them as they come.