I’m home for a day, and thinking about turning it into a Saturday. It’s not an uncommon desire, but the last time I succeeded was during the last days of the 20th century. Just too many very interesting things to do.
Reading through my aggregator, I ran across a very well expressed post (NECC Wrap up & Reflections) from Josh Thomas (Pondering). I think that everyone agrees that NECC was great. It was energizing, exhausting (not a bad thing), we made new connections and enhanced old ones, we learned, and we taught. Still, conferences are an evolving thing, and, like the Web (1.0,2.0,n…) this evolution is accellerating. Josh talks about the three Ps, that he believe should be a part of conference presentations. the first two, he found missing from many of the sessions he attended.
Apart from the folks I mentioned (Dewitt Jones, David Warlick, and Will Richardson), what was missing from sessions, in my judgement (and others, I think), was passion and purpose. Too much How To; not enough why. Too much incremental improvement; not enough revolutionary ideas. Again, it wasn’t all missing — Will (Richardson) was terrific … what folks (I think) come to these sessions to hear: he was passionate, provocative, and purposeful. But too many of the sessions missed the first two P’s.
I hope that the NECC folks are not taking offense with these criticisms. They are constructive and expressed because we love NECC, and want it to be everything that our greatest dreams imagine. Probably, that is impossible, but if we express our dreams, then there’s a chance that what’s great can become even better.
We’re all looking forward to Atlanta!
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Definitely looking forward to Atlanta — and to where ever the conversation leads in the meantime. Enjoy the downtime, DW — it’s gonna be a hot one here in NC today!
I presented a session on opensource portals – and I did it with passion. I think the “why” was addressed in many of the sessions presented by people from the rank-and-file of education (the district and classroom levels). We see how the new communication / collaboration tools are transforming learning and promote them from the ‘why do it’ direction. The discussions following many of the sessions were infused with the first two P’s.