ISTE 2010: Day 1

So here I am, sit­ting in the Blogger’s Cafe at the ISTE Con­fer­ence, a place that until now has existed only in myth and leg­end. This is, depend­ing on how you count it, either my first or my third ISTE. Two years ago, I attended NECC 2008, but only vir­tu­ally, through the activ­i­ties at ISTE Island in Sec­ond Life. I met many peo­ple there, and blogged about my expe­ri­ence. Last year, I did the same, again meet­ing new peo­ple, build­ing my net­work of col­leagues, and grow­ing my inter­est in attend­ing in person.

So this, year I’m at ISTE for the third year in a row, but this time in per­son. And as I tend to do, I didn’t do this halfway: not only am I attend­ing my first ISTE, but I orga­nized a Tweetup ear­lier this morn­ing, I’m vol­un­teer­ing at the Infor­ma­tion Booth in about an hour, and I’m pre­sent­ing a model les­son on Tues­day.

I have attended pro­fes­sional con­fer­ences before, some­times with other col­leagues from my dis­trict and some­times on my own. In some ways, this is much like the annual con­fer­ence of any other large, inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tion: there are thou­sands of atten­dees (I over­heard one per­son esti­mate it at 20,000), a huge exhibitor floor of cor­po­ra­tions want­ing us to buy their prod­ucts, a book­store, keynotes, work­shops, and so on.

But I think what defines ISTE for me, and what sets it way apart from the other con­fer­ences I’ve been to, is that this is all about con­nec­tions. I walked into the Den­ver Con­ven­tion Cen­ter this morn­ing, and ran into Scott Mer­rick, some­one I’ve known for two years online, but never met in per­son until today. Although I am a lit­tle intim­i­dated by the enor­mity of the site and the num­ber of peo­ple here, it was imme­di­ately com­fort­able, because I knew that I already know dozens of peo­ple. I’ve run into many of them, and I’m very likely to run into more as the week goes on.

This con­fer­ence, then, isn’t a one-​​shot event where I will be immersed in indi­vid­ual learn­ing for a few days and then go back to “real­ity” where I can only hope to apply a few things that may have been absorbed while the rest evap­o­rate like the fad­ing shreds of an inter­rupted dream. This con­fer­ence feels to me much more like an intense con­cen­tra­tion of the rela­tion­ships and con­ver­sa­tions that hap­pen on a daily and weekly basis with the net­work of pro­fes­sional col­leagues that I’ve been build­ing over the last two years through Twit­ter, blog­ging, and Sec­ond Life.

Every moment of my time here so far has involved learn­ing. Even at din­ner last night, the con­ver­sa­tion turned to some deep philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sions about the nature of learning.

On its sur­face, ISTE is a tech­nol­ogy con­fer­ence. At its root, though, are not hard­ware and soft­ware and ven­dors and books. This con­fer­ence is really about pro­fes­sional edu­ca­tors who care deeply about learn­ing and stu­dents and max­i­miz­ing potential.

Tomor­row I begin attend­ing the for­mal ses­sions. I expect to learn more than I can process, and will be blog­ging about my expe­ri­ences. I also expect to learn just as much from the infor­mal gath­er­ings, the hall­way con­ver­sa­tions, the din­ner mee­tups, and the other amaz­ing peo­ple I will meet. What I hope to bring back to my dis­trict is a renewed enthu­si­asm for cre­at­ing an awe­some envi­ron­ment in our schools for stu­dents to learn and thrive, and ideas about how to intro­duce my work col­leagues to the power of this net­work I have discovered.