Well I missed a few scheduled sessions yesterday. The first was the morning one. Hard to move that fast in the morning but I wasn’t all that hot on it. Since I was running late I hit the flashing lights and sweet talking of the vendor booths.
Vendor Booths
They are more aggressive than I have ever experienced. The used car salesman tactics are in full swing. If you happen to move slightly their direction they grab you and begin to yell their wonders to you. They glad hand you as you make a pile of excuses and they slap a larger pile of gloss rags in your hand as you run screaming to the next trap booth.
What gets me is that the products are really static. Nothing is making me tingle in any way. It even seems the software developers are a bit down too. It has been a dry spell for a few years as far as the money flowing from districts and I think it is taking its toll.
Software wise, it is still the throw more features at it model rather than fixing the UI quirks or touting a nifty redesign that focuses on rounded edges and cartoony graphics.
Open Source
What is nifty has been the big presence of open source in the conference. You can see from the photo that the crowd had exceeded fire code by the start. Moodle, of course, is the big draw but the fact that they have moved from a shared room to a space of their own this year is great. Budgets suck and they are bad right now. This is the best way, I believe to start bring the real world in. The big community of developers that work on these thing are better than the one tech support person per region that the corporations are giving.
The other sessions
I skipped the copyright stuff, I a already to the brim with that stuff. Since things have only gotten worse I stuck with the flashing lights of the booth. A conference buddy checked out the AFI session and turns out it was just showing what was on united streaming. Nifty. I will have to explore for that. It is a lot of how to’s for film and video creation covering the writing process, directing and is geared for the classroom. A real world connection and ease to get.
Other observations
One cool thing that ISTE did in setting it up was the creation of Technorati tags for the conference and the individual sessions. I noticed last night that I got a bit of traffic from it. But what I did notice that it wasn’t that great. Either people are not checking it out or that the ed crowd is still not entirely connected in that way yet.
Other junk
We went to a fancy, smancy restaurant last night and watched the nifty water show in Centennial Park that is across the street. I will post that video when it is ready.
Technorati Tags: education, n07s589, n07s659, NECC2007, technology
As promised, video published! Check it here