NECC 2008

I recently attended the NECC conference in San Antonio, TX. It was extremely overwhelming at first. I later heard that there were 11,000 people there! The conference consisted of about 5, 1 hour sessions a day. There were probably 40 choices per time slot! I ended up going to different sessions than I originally planned the first day because the conference was so large that I didn't want to walk across the convention center. I felt like it was my first day on my college campus. Also, if you didn't arrive at a session 20 minutes early you would get shut out because it would fill up! However, I only missed 2 of my sessions; I think I did pretty well.

The session that had the most impact for me was the use of Wikipedia in the social studies classroom, combined with Alan November's keynote on the importance of teaching our students web literacy. These two sessions have completely changed the way I'm going to approach a unit I am teaching in the fall. Originally, I had decided to have my students research world religions and create a wiki of their research in groups, but after attending these two sessions I realized how limiting this is. Most likely my students would simply go to Wikipedia, find the entry on their assigned religion and copy & paste the information into their wiki. Not very valuable in the scheme of things. Instead, I'm going to have my students analyze Wikipedia as a social construct. Wikipedia is really a conversation rather than a place to find information. (As I learned at NECC). It indeed houses information, but since the information is created by Wikipedia users and is always in flux, it is a comment on what the users of Wikipedia value. I'm going to have my students analyze the content of the Wikipedia entries. I'll have them compare their textbooks to Wikipedia, analyze the hyper links in each post. I'll also have them explore the discussion & history tabs. I will then have them use their wikis as a place to discuss what they've learned. I might even add a part to the assignment where they create content in Wikipedia that they see is missing, or add to the discussion in Wikipedia. I believe that these strategies can move my students from simply consumers of information, to producers.

I attended so many great sessions it is hard to include everything in this post! Overall, the message I got from the conference was the shift that is happening as a result of having an Internet rich with information. As I have believed for a long time, teachers are no longer the keepers of the keys to knowledge. Instead, our mission is to guide our students through the world and help them understand how to collect and use knowledge!