I’ll be spending most of the day preparing for my sessions at NCAECT, North Carolina’s ISTE affiliate conference — this year, being held in Concord, North Carolina, just east of Charlotte. It is a fantastic conference, not quite as large as NCETC, but certainly as rich and exciting.
One unusual, but welcomed aspect of this conference is that both keynote speakers are women. I often hear from conference organizers that they are looking for more women to deliver their large group addresses. I am certainly looking forward to both of these, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach kicking off the general conference on Thursday and Deneen Frazier Bowen for the closing banquet. Hmmm, do I need to add something to my name? David Aloysius Warlick?
Featured presenters include Leslie Fisher, Kevin Honeycutt (from ESSDACK), me, and Tammy Worchester (also from ESSDACK).
I’ll be doing an all-day workshop tomorrow on collaborative web tools. The main theme of the day will be using the Net for personal learning — personal learning networks. I am hoping to invite some networked people in to the workshop to describe their personal learning networks, via Skype, and perhaps Ustream a final conversation about personal learning networks, and teaching and learning, tapping into some backchannel exhaust.
I’ll also be doing a video games session and another PLN session at the conference, and, a real treat, Sheryl and I will moderate an EduBloggerCon at the conference. The one that Will Richardson and I did last year seemed to have been a hit, so the conference wants to continue it as a tradition.
For those who will be blogging the conference, the tags that are registered on Hitchhikr are ncaect08 and ncaect2008. Conference photographers should tag their photos the same, thought ncaect is currently being displayed on the conference page (http://hitchhikr.com/?id=297).
Perhaps the best single concept that describes where we should be focusing our efforts, as educators, is constructivist learning. Gary Stager e-mailed me an announcement about an event being attached to NECC this year in San Antonio, the second annual (June 29) 
The second “best” part of the conference was getting to see Majora Carter.
Anyway, I came home yesterday and downloaded 
I arrived at the Hilton in downtown (or is it uptown) NYC about midnight last night. It’s one of those cool little “Look at Me” things that occassionally acompany what I do, to land in an airport and be picked up by a limo (town car). Wouldn’t seem like much to most, but where I grew up — well that’s special. Of course, as I ride down that escalator at Newark Liberty Airport, there are about fifty drivers, dressed in black, probably from more than 50 nationalities, each holding a sign out with somebody’s last name. They each lift their signs, as the see me paying attention, as if they’re saying, “pick me, pick me!”
Yesterday’s Literacy Promise Conference in Salt Lake City was phenomenal. Most of the presentations were very traditional, in that they addressed standard classroom challenges of teaching reading, vocabulary, etc. — and they did it brilliantly. I should buy some of their books, because the classroom ideas were amazing, all paper-based, but amazing. I presented on contemporary literacy, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. The morning session was fairly full, but the afternoon audience seemed much more filtered — many obviously warned to stay away, because he wasn’t talking about OUR literacy, but a few told by the mornings attendees, you have to see these ideas. It was a great audience. This was possibly the best blogged session I’ve presented in a very long time, with giants like Darren Drapper and Kelly Dumont in the audience.
It’s really been hard for me to distinguish the days of the past week. For instance, it seems that it was only a few hours ago that I presented at the NAACE conference in Torquay. Then we got on a train for about three hours, then a plane for about seven hours, then a hotel room for about three hours, then another plane for five hours, then I’m in a hotel in Salt Lake City, and it’s 5:00 PM. Where in the heck is the sun right now, anyway? My clock says it’s 5:30 AM, Mountain Time.
We landed around midnight last night at JFK and spend a few hours sleeping in a Fairfield inn. I left Brenda and Martin at American Airlines for a short flight home and I’m spending a fairly comfortable morning at the JetBlue gates with WiFi and 110 electricity. Tomorrow, I’ll be speaking at a literacy conference in Salt Lake City, and am anxious to learn how my geeky ideas will resonate with them.
Niel McLean, of Becta, is talking about what technology is doing for students. He makes a point about how traditionally we have seen boys work in bursts, while girls seem to move through their learning fairly steadily. However, when ICT is involved in the learning experience, boys tend to become more steady with their activity.
The current speaker is Professor John Naughton, and he is drawing extensively from Niel Postman. He’s making an interesting point about our shift from information scarce environments to information abundant environment. He says that our mistake has been to think of information as an economy. It’s why, with the rise of broadcast TV, it was predicted that TV would wipe out Radio. He says that it may be much more helpful to think of the information environment as an eco-system. It does a much better job of handling the complexities of the information landscape.