NECC (National Education Computing Conference) 2007 begins today. This has been one of the conferences I have attended consistently over the years. It is what I consider a K-12 educational practitioners conference and a great place for me to keep up on issues and practices. It also has possibly the best vendors area of any conference I have ever attended. The vendor area used to be where I searched for new hardware and software. With Web 2.0 apps and practices the vendor area is probably less important now than it used to be, but I still like to look.
If you don’t or can’t attend, you can follow many things that happen at this conference remotely. The ISTE NECC link provides access to many information sources (podcasts and some live video). Blogs are also a great way to learn what was presented in sessions and typically embedded in the blog entries are links to reosurces provided by the presenters. When I began blogging in 2002, my first series of posts were from the conference that year. It is actually interesting for me to review the posts from the June of each year since then to reread my comments on the conference.
Using blogs to follow conferences has become an organized process. David Warlick created a site called Hitchhikr to organize blog posts from many different educational conferences. I see there are now 1494 posts and the conferences intro keynote is not until this evening. NECC participants have recently been asked to tag posts (necc07). You can easily locate posts with this tag using an aggregator such as Technorati. I have created a watchlist for necc07 and I can watch as the posts role in (now mine among them).
BTW – I checked and it took about 5 minutes for this post to surface through Technorati and my watchlist so you can almost follow events in real time.
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