The opening keynote will be author and former World Bank Vice‐President Jean‐Francois Rischard, who will speak about the role of education in our increasingly complex and interconnected world. Dr. Jeff Piontek, Head of School at the Hawaii Technology Academy (HTA) and the candidate selected via our first ever crowdsourced project, will present the closing keynote.

The new interactive Conference Planner can help you organize your ISTE 2010 experience and make sure you don’t miss anything.

If you have an idea for a hot topic you’d like to discuss, consider organizing a Birds-of-a-Feather session where discussions about topics of interest can take place. Check out the Birds-of-a-Feather planning thread on our ISTE 2010 conference Ning to suggest your topic area (or view others), or request a meeting time for your group. Submission deadline is March 10.

Did you know if you are not a current ISTE member registering for ISTE 2010 automatically provides you with a standard ISTE membership? We’re hoping to see lots of new faces at ISTE 2010 so register today!

What’s on your ISTE 2010 “must do” list?

As we’ve forged new territory through this process, we continue to come back to Surowiecki’s observations about what would make a crowdsourcing experiment a genuine reflection of the wisdom of crowds.  And, with this in mind, we continue to refine the process.  In the first two phases, we publically tallied the votes. This provided the venue for insightful discussions about keynote themes, the purpose and power of keynotes, and reflections on the process but was less true to the wisdom of crowd’s requirements of decentralized thinking and independent input.  For the next phase, we are staying truer to Surowiecki’s guidance and building on the public discussion that has come before to solicit decentralized and independent opinions.  The votes for each of the keynote candidates will be made anonymously and the tallies will not be shown during the voting process. The final vote tallies will be revealed when we announce the keynote selection in February.

Our goal has been to involve ISTE 2010 conference attendees as well as the greater ed tech community in the planning process, to listen to the wisdom of the ISTE community, and to explore new territory using technology as a tool to do things otherwise not possible. We hope you have enjoyed being part of the process. As with anything new, we understood there would be missteps and opportunities to improve the process the next time around. We would like to hear from you about how it all went. What do you think of our experiment so far? How might you improve the process? Please let us know what you think went well, and what wasn’t so great. We welcome your comments and suggestions!

Vote now!

The tool has been backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from the onset, therefore funding will probably never be an issue. A strategic network has formed around it comprised of BHEF, the Battelle Center for Mathematics and Science Education Policy at Ohio State University (OSU), and Raytheon. The point of this alliance is to set standards and goals for the tool in the real world so that other institutions, specifically STEM-oriented universities, can effectively run their own models to determine what types of polices will help U.S. schools increase the number of students being prepared to enter careers in STEM fields. The model itself takes real world data, such as age, gender, standardized test scores, dropout rates, and other census bureau records, and mashes them up to create an environment where the researcher can implement different scenarios to test the validity of a given hypothesis.

This tool and its uses are a lot to take in if you are just a humble tech geek like myself, but I do understand enough about it to be excited about some key aspects of the project. The first is seeing a major for-profit defense contractor like Raytheon taking an interest in education. We could use more of this in the U.S. because, as we know, we are consistently out-performed by our global neighbors year after year in STEM-related fields. The second is seeing so many influential organizations backing open-source technologies that directly benefit education. Proprietary software that isn’t free to all of us has a place and will not become extinct, but when it comes to solving problems on a national or global level, software that is open-source turns more heads and gets more people involved. Getting the best techs in the industry focused on education can only create positive results.

Only time will tell if this tool will be successful in increasing the number of young people entering STEM-related jobs. I hope we haven’t seen the last of Raytheon and other private sector juggernauts getting involved with the education of our children. Maybe the next step is getting Microsoft, Apple, Dell, and HP in the same room to discuss how they can use this tool to collaborate on something that would help our students, instead of always working just hard enough to be this year’s best “productivity tool.”

Official Raytheon Announcement (PDF)

STEM Research and Modeling Network (SRMN)

When we go to conferences, part of what you gain is perspectives from outside your school, your district, and your state. In an era of scripted curriculum, you cannot underestimate the value of this. At the same time, I need to make what I’m learning work in the context of NCLB, my high-needs school, and within a district that has a pacing guide. How do I make this make sense to my fellow teachers? This is a juggling act I do after each conference. I’m not complaining, I find it challenging and exhilarating at the same time. My site is pretty supportive even if most of them are not putting the same things in practice that I do. They want to do more, and I want to help them, but I have to respect their concerns about cell phones, and one-to-one laptops, and not treat them as “retrograde”, but instead work with towards change (maybe for both of us). When I hear someone at a conference discuss project-based learning, I have to hear that it may well be far superior to practicing “fidelity to our textbook program” and that there are other ways to educate students that what passes for “scientifically proven” instructional methods my district uses. I may look like I’m hanging out with my “clique” at NECC, but the reality is I may be expanding my circle of thought.

Photo credit: Opening Night on flickr photo sharing

Being the parent of a child with autism makes you a little more aware of eye contact in conversation. I’m noticing some interesting patterns at NECC that say a lot about how I socialize. First, there are times when it has become painful for me to make and maintain eye contact. That has to be a sign that I’m overwhelmed by the sheer number of folks I’m seeing and meeting. While this year’s conference has a smaller turnout, 18,000, that’s still a lot of people to plop down in one place.

Sometimes when I’m talking to folks, I find my eyes wandering to scan the crowd and I’ve seen others do this as well. We are either trying to find someone we were waiting for in the sea of people, or checking for faces we know in person already. Sometimes we are checking for someone we have only known online up to this point and have been dying to meet IRL. This is that one golden chance to meet others we haven’t seen face to face and we don’t want to miss that opportunity.

Those of us who have already been to conferences, even local ones, have a circle of people we know and hang out with. They are our base camp in this sea of humanity. It is easy to stay in a tunnel here. If you are completely unfamiliar with teaching conventions, and never go online for PD and professional social networking (and there still are folks like that even at a place like NECC), you will stay in your bubble of local district buddies, an “accidental” tourist at the convention.

If you are too wrapped up in your “network” you already have, you will miss conversations with the person in front of you, or next to you as you go down your must meet check list. You will be in your own bubble that includes only folks you KNOW are like minded, but may miss a conversation you should have had with the person in your district back home, or in a session at NECC who is from the other side of the country.

My favorite meetings are the ones that are impossible to plan, but easy to undermine. You miss them when you only talk to the folks you already know. Those are the connections based on nothing more than propinquity. You sit next to someone at a session, and one of you strikes up a conversation. You are invited to tag along to a dinner, and are seated by someone from the other end of the country that you’ve never met before. Someone strikes up a conversation as you wait for a shuttle bus. You could learn a lot, or, you could miss that metaphorical bus, as you avoid eye contact and conversation.

Photo credit: My eye on Flickr

Thing got off to a triumphant start with a keynote address (for the second year in a row) from famed author and New Yorker staff writer, Malcolm Gladwell.  Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point (2000) and Outliers (2008), used some obscure triva about Fleetwood Mac, the British-born rock band, to argue that effort — and not talent — is the cornerstone of a successful adult.  To see a video of Gladwell’s complete speech, click here.  To read my live-blogging from Gladwell’s keynote address, follow this link. (For those who are interested, all of my live-blogging was done using coveritlive.com.)

Throughout the week, Joe Corbett, the man behind @isteconnects, interviewed countless NECC participants throughout ISTE Central and streamed hours and hours of footage direct to your favorite website, isteconnects.org.  Check out the highlights at ISTE Central Interviews, Part I and ISTE Central Interviews, Part II.  Here’s a little sample for your viewing pleasure:

On Tuesday, June 30th, the flagship event was the “Oxford-style debate” held in the grand ballroom.  Moderated by NPR’s Robert Siegel in front of a crowd of thousands, the debate featured two teams of three who attempted to answer the question: “Are brick-and-mortar schools harmful to the future of education?”  Much to the surprise of some, the bricks-and-mortar team trounced the digitalistas on the other side.  But there were really compelling points made on both sides.  You can check out my live-blogging of the event here.

One of NECC 09’s most memorable moments actually took place outside of the Washington Convention Center: on Wednesday, a squad of hundreds of blue-shirted ISTE volunteers took to Capitol Hill and lobbied their local representatives on behalf of educators everywhere.  I was tagging along with a team of teachers from the Boston area as they addressed one of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s senior staffers.  You can see photos I live-tweeted from our journey through the capital here.  And below is a an edited video documenting ISTE’s “storming of the Hill”:

And of course, there were the sessions.  I was really impressed by the level of depth, and forward-looking quality of the presentations I attended.  I live-blogged as many as I could, and you can read through some of my accounts here:

• Live Blogging: “Digital Citizenship: Tools, Tips and Ideas”
• Live-Blogging: “Video in the Classroom”
• Live-Blogging: “Blogs, Wikis and RSS in the Classroom”
• Live-Blogging: “Communication and Creativity: Using TuxPaint”
• Live-Blogging: “Tablet PCs in Action: Experience the Possibilities”
• Live-Blogging: “Using Games and Simulations in Learning”
• Live-blogging: “A Meeting of Moodlers”

While I was attending sessions and blogging like a madman, the @isteconnects team was walking every inch of the Washington Convention Center, recording practically everything worth seeing.  Below I’m posting a small sample of the all the videos we shot over the last four days — but you can see the everything here:

If you still haven’t had your fill of ISTE NECC ‘09 (and trust me, I understand where you’re coming from!), check out the post we compiled last night that features 26 blog posts about the conference by attendees, and our article about iPhone / iPod Touch in the classroom.  You can also read The Daily Leader (NECC09’s official newspaper)  here.

I hope everyone else learned as much — and had as much fun — as the @isteconnects team did.  See you all next year!

Zach

@zbgoodwin