Intellectual Fireworks NECC06 - Day 1

necc06

necc

NECC
NECC06


Wow. NECC 06. Wow.

It was like a wave crashing on me. I did not like all of it. Some of it made me damn mad. I pushed for some answers on things that I am concerned about, and got nowhere. Vendor space was overwhelming. I think that there is so much here I am going to just do a bullet list of things that come to mind. It was that WOW.

• Thornberg and OPEN source software. Hokey presentation by one of the big names. Too much evangelism here an with the whole open source crew . They think their time is now, and as they have the stars in their eyes this is their moment to shine.
o Points of interest:
o NH is moving to Open Office (WIN) to avoid $68 per year license fee.
o Inkspace =Illustrator
o Blender is OPEN 3d movie maker (render is slow)
o NVU makes movies
o Tux paint= Kidpix
o KeygenUS (I think it generates CD keys on the fly if you want to rip off software) Thornberg said it explicitly 2X.
o School Wikis - http://www.schoolwiki.org/wiki.cgi

• Anderson and Podcasting
o Larry Wilson, Lucy Gray, Tim Wilson (The Savy Technologist), Ted Lai. David Warlick
o Lots of Applespeak as they are all Apple Distinguished Educators.
o They collaborated on line, never got together before the event and presentation showed it. Very jumpy, info bouncing back and forth.
o If wikis and podcasts and blogging are Web 2.0 as they said, and this is the style of the “collaborative” information, isn’t it all buzz? Where is the great mind that can add insight, perspective and organization to provide a clear picture? Wading through lots of ideas to find the nugget or the outline or prophet baseline that is the seminal work of a generation will be hard. I wonder how Jefferson or Adams would survive in a blogging environment?
o They set up a wiki to track notes real time. Neat idea.
o Portable digital recorders
 Olympus W2S200S – USB connector, 55 hrs of CD audio
 http://podcastrigs.com – equipment for podcasting.
o Garage band has the ability of “enhanced” podcasts with slides dropped in.
o They did a great disservice by not showing non-Apple pespectives. NECC and/or should have made it clear in the program notes that it was going to be that way.
o Short shift on explicit stuff you find in iTunes.(just be careful – huh?)
o No real classroom examples.

• SmartBoards & BlackBoard – worthless, not as advertised.
• Ubanutu – Linux fro Education
o Ubanutu can be done live
o Indiana going open source
o Open source “lab” was a thin client linux set up runnin P3 laptops sans hard drives and a 3year old server as the file server – THAT has potential for old machines.
o What is Moodle?
 http://cdc.humboldt.edu/lms/whatis.html
 Moodle is a learning management system that lets you provide documents, graded assignments, quizzes, discussion forums, etc. to your students with an easy to learn and use interface. Moodle is developed by a worldwide effort of over 75,000 students, faculty, and staff at over 6500 institutions around the world, coordinated by the main site at Moodle.org.
o Folks who use it are passionate.
o Windows/Linus Security is NOT a problem if you are all Linux (whoop dee do – sell that to my Supt.)
o The time is now for open source
o These are the geekiest people I have ever seen.

• Vendor Space – holy moley! ¼ of a mile of vendors. The heck with sessions, the action is here.

Negroponte tomorrow AM.

Wow.

Later - Steve

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