Today’s the first ‘working’ day of my school holidays and I’ve been sitting here musing about the NECC conference that is taking place in San Antonio, Texas over the coming weekend. A group of Australian educators are leaving on a tour today that takes in this conference and I am envious that I’m not travelling with them. After blogging for nearly six months I feel such a part of this network of learning and feel that I’m going to miss so much by not being in attendance. I’m kicking myself that I didn’t follow through and write a proposal to my school asking that I be permitted to attend. It was a possibility, but I quite literally couldn’t find the time to get it done. It sounds ridiculous, but I really don’t feel like I’ve had a spare minute in five and a half months -there was always something more pressing that needed doing and so here I am, musing about what might have been!
I don’t think I really need to worry – my network knows I’m here and I’m sure much from the conference is going to be fed out virtually to those of us watching from the fringes. Vicki Davis has just posted about her Cool Cat Teacher’s PLN that she has very kindly set up which will feed a lot of info to those of us not attending. There’s an NECC 2008 tab where you can track info feeding out of the conference. Vicki has uploaded a presentation that she and Julie Lindsay (an Australian expat working in Qatar) are going to be sharing at the conference. It’s about Digital Citizenship and all going well it should be embedded here.
Lisa Parisi has just written a great reflective post about how we bring others with us as we learn to integrate technology to support the learning in our schools and her feelings about attending NECC for the first time. It’s well worth reading. I love what she has to say about risk and how failure makes us better at what we do – it echoes a post I wrote recently about similar sentiments.
So, to all of you out there lucky enough to be experiencing NECC physically, not virtually, I wish you well. Soak it up!
Lucacept - intercepting the Web 
I’m not going either, and I totally understand your feelings. Plus I have to travel over the weekend. Connecting, even virtually, will be spotty for me:(
Very nice overview. Why don’t you make it your goal (as I did in 2006 when I couldn’t attend) to be one of the best bloggers covering NECC. When I gave daily overviews of what was happening… I got e-mails and comments that people thought I was there. It is very valuable to have the “slipper and robe” warriors out there perusing everything and showing the emerging patterns. Best wishes and I’ve just followed you on twitter.
Hi Jenny,
Fantastic! I am so impressed and in awe of how you’ve so totally immersed yourself in a vibrant online network. Terrific. I look forward to working together again.
Cheers,
Tom —
Hi Jenny,
You will be here in spirit and the on the ground view from your network will be interesting and with an Aussie flavour.
Tony