1st days at NECC

Hi all, I just arrived at the Convention hall and already found out I left my phone at my brothers house. Not real sure how I am going to call him to let him know I am ready to come home. Oh well, worse things have happened. There are a ton of people here, I feel really lost. This building is absolutely huge and so finding my way around is going to be quite a trick. I plan on wandering around today so that I get a feel for where I am and by tomorrow can get to where I need to go! This should be fun! It is not nearly as hot as I thought it was going to be and in fact the convention hall is definitely a little cold!! I am registered and got my bag, I am waiting for the keynote speaker later. Will add more later.

Okay, this place is huge and there are so many people here! If you don't get to a session early it is definitely full, especially the web 2.0 and open source stuff. I am getting ready to go to the Open Source Playground, that should be fun.

The keynote speaker last night was talking about the power of the crowd. Really good speaker and interesting topic. I found it interesting how accurate the crowd could be. He cited several examples of instances where this is true. I am going to grab his book before I leave.

I listened to a talk about Virtual simulations using hand helds this morning that was interesting. It was presented by Chris Dede, a Harvard professor and one of the graduate students. They created a virtual simulation that used hand-helds and actually worked in the real environment. Middle school and high school students followed a path to find an answer to the problem of aliens crashing outside their school. They had to decide why the aliens were here, what their purpose was. They used math skills and data gathering to arrive at a conclusion. It is still a University study but very interesting. He had a lot to say about how 1 - 1 computing would take place in schools and his opinion was that cell phones could possible be the route that would end up being most populat. With the technology available to project screens onto walls the small screens are no longer a problem. His thoughts were really interesting!

Bye for now, I will add more later!

Off to NECC

I leave for San Antonio Saturday and I am hoping to learn a lot. I am going to take a laptop with me using open source software. I have edubuntu loaded for the operating system, I am going to be using FireFox as my Internet browser and I am using Google Docs for my production software. I am also going to blog about the whole experience, what I see, who I talk to and so on. I will also post pictures that I take around the city.