NECC 2009

This is huge—seriously.

In excess of 18 000 attendees come to Washington DC in a festival of digital educational everything for the 30th anniversary edition of the National Education Computing Conference, or "NECC" to its friends. Here are the interactive whiteboards, student response systems, Adobe, Dell, HP, Microsoft and other people trying to sell you other shiny things, and very large primary school teachers (I love visiting the US—it makes me feel slim)

No Apple, though—a corporate decision made last year means that Apple does not "do" conferences. Curious decision.

President Helen Padgett, PhD, and Dr Don Knezeck, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), open the conference.

Helen states ISTE's commitment to educators and asks policy makers to focus on the future of students and schools. (Fairly safe, motherhood statements here)

She then introduces Malcolm Gladwell (author of several books including the Tipping Point and Blink) as the keynote speaker

"When it comes to learning, what you get is a simple function of what you put in. That is the beautiful and powerful idea behind learning..." says Gladwell, "Sometimes the struggle to learn something is where the actual learning lies"

Hmm - not sure that this actually means anything, but it's probably meant as an allotrope of process being more important than product. More motherhood stuff. Move along: nothing to see here.

Despite this, the message that we should "embrace failure, as this is how we learn" is a valuable one, but not one that I've seen adopted wholesale anywhere.

Gladwell adds that our learning boils down to two avenues: Capitalisation - where we concentrate on our strengths vs Compensation where we concentrate on our weaknesses. He suggests we need more of the latter.