This blog has been cross-posted from Jon's blog Educational Insanity.
Jonathan D. Becker, J.D., Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University. His teaching and scholarship lie at the intersection of educational leadership, policy and technology.
For me, attending NECC is as much an ethnographic experience as it is formal professional development. In other words, I spend a lot of the time immersing myself in the educational technology culture, observing the interactions and dynamics of the attendees. I do this partly because that's a big part of how I learn, but it's also because I'm a researcher/"scholar" housed within a university department of educational leadership (which includes an emphasis on policy studies). I feel a need to stay abreast of the big picture, the educational technology policy streams (Kingdon, 1984).
In this vein, after leaving NECC this year, I kept asking myself "what just happened?" What DID I just experience? To help answer those questions, I starting going back through the program (online and the print version). I found myself doing a bit of a content analysis of the program (yes, I can find data anywhere and make just about anything into a social science). I would have liked to be able to take the whole program and run it through a word cloud generator like Wordle or Tag Crowd. However, despite multiple attempts at trickery, the best I could do was to generate a word cloud that was dominated by days and times and other words that were irrelevant to my purpose.
Instead, I looked through the print program for words that seemed to pop up regularly and thought of words that I was interested in seeing in relation to the program. I then did a keyword search of the online program. I specifically searched for the terms in the titles of the sessions. I believe that the titles of the sessions are critical; they are (or should be) indicators of what the session is about and are intended to draw attendees attention. I should also note that I used root words where possible to simulate boolean searching logic. For example, I searched for "teach" so as to find sessions with "teach," "teaching," or "teacher" in the title. So, without further ado, here's what I found.
The terms that I searched for that showed up in over 100 session titles were:
I like that "learn" outranks "teach," but otherwise no surprises here. NECC is a conference about teaching and learning with technology. Next on the frequency list were the following terms:
"Digital" strikes me as a bit of a catchy and/or catch-all term. I don't quite know how to think of it as anything but a pretty meaningless buzzword (NOTE: arguably most of these terms are buzzwords bereft of meaning). The next six terms, though, speak pretty clearly to the move to the cloud. If NECC is ultimately about teaching and learning with technology, these days the heavy emphasis is on Web 2.0 tools for teaching and learning in the 21st Century. Drilling down even further, I'm pleased to see the presence of "collaborat*" and "project*" (I checked to see if any of the sessions were actually about LCD projectors, BTW). There is definitely a move to thinking about how Web 2.0 affords collaborative, project-based learning.
There's a bit of a mixed bag in the next set of terms, but my interpretation is that there is also an emphasis on teachers integrating media, especially podcasts, into the teaching/learning process. From there, then, there is definitely a bit of a fascination with all things Google and all things IWB (interactive whiteboards).
So, I think that gives us a good sense of what NECC is about. What is NECC not about?
While there is some mention of leadership and there's even a leadership strand (with only 13 dedicated sessions), there are VERY few sessions at NECC that are about leadership or policy. The conversation is almost entirely focused on the classroom. I think that's hugely problematic. It reinforces my beliefs about silos and the absence of leadership at all levels from the educational technology conversations. Furthermore, to have conversations about teaching and learning in the absence of policy context creates problems and frustration. If I could give advice to ISTE for planning future conferences, I would suggest they consider ways to generate more conversation/discussion about educational technology policy.
My "findings" probably don't surprise most of those who will read this post. For me, though, they confirm my suspicions and offer evidence to support whatever claims I might make about what NECC is and is not. And, it's always a good idea to have evidence to support claims, right?
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