Industry Convenes at NECC ’06
Conference to showcase the newest ed tech offerings
SCHEDULED SPEAKER Wired magazine
co-founder Nicholas Negroponte will
discuss MIT’s One Laptop per Child
initiative, which he is leading.
THE 27TH ANNUAL National Educational Computing Conference (NECC), presented by the International Society for Technology in Education, will be held July 5-7 in San Diego. Among the attractions will be speakers Dewitt Jones andNicholas Negroponte.
On the opening night of the conference, Jones will deliver a keynote address in which he’ll reflect on his career as a National Geographic photographer and describe the creative tools he uses in his work. Negroponte, co-founder of Wired magazine and author of Being Digital, is also chair of the media lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He will speak about MIT’s One Laptop per Child (OLPC; laptop.media.mit.edu) initiative, which he is heading and which aims to put inexpensive laptops into the hands of disadvantaged children worldwide.
NECC ’06 will also feature a broad spectrum of sessions and workshops, including more than 160 hands-on pre-conference workshops, as well as the San Diego-Tijuana Borderland Collaboration, which is new for 2006 and will feature sessions in Spanish with delegations of teachers and students from Mexico.
Several themes populate this year’s conference schedule, with a variety of strands for attendees to choose from, such as: Technology Capacity Learning Environments, Vision Leading and Accountability, Human Capacity, and Ethics and Equality. The conferencewill feature 1,300 booths and more than 500 exhibitors—including Pearson Digital Learning, AutoSkill International, Compass Learning, and Fourier Systems.