NECC 2008: From My Perspective

I have been reading a lot of the summaries of NECC 2008 and because I went immediately unplugged for 5 days after the conference, I haven't had a chance to put in my 2 cents yet....I am still thinking about a lot of things. This was only my second NECC. In Atlanta, I missed the whole "making connections"...I missed the "Blogger's Cafe" and attended a lot of really great sessions that I found out afterwards were "live blogged", recorded in a sense so it was possible to revisit from different points of view. This year, when planning what sessions I wanted to see, I made a conscious effort to avoid things that I knew were being podcast, or ustreamed or that I could go back and revisit at another time....I feel like once again I was missing something. In The Strength of Weak Ties: ChatCasting: A Summary, David Jakes does an amazing job of summarizing the chatcasting process and asking some of the tough questions about its role in future conferences. He especially hit the nail on the head when he asked about the presenter Is having 10 people typing distracting? I had to get over several people blogging my sessions live, I can only imagine ten typing furiously. Wouldn't you want to see what they were saying? I struggle with this even when I am notetaking on the web....doesn't the presenter have the right to see what I am posting (positive or negative) and defend their presentation

I think that because there was no organized process for distributing the "any time / anywhere" content, it was difficult to find after the fact...I am working on a post for myself that contains links to all of the events I want to revisit. I often use microblogging to find out about events when I am offsite, but when right there...it became overwhelming to me. I think a moderator is important and I think all parties need to be "on the same page"

I have seen this be a POWERFUL force in the classroom. I have learned a TON from following "offsite". I will be posting later today my plan for "decompressing NECC", but thanks David for your post and questions. It will be interesting to see how this evolves over time...I feel like my pendulum has swung too far to one side....time for me, personally to find out where my balance lies.

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