Not Cool: Untimely Updates to an Event

OK, sure: the last post here promised some info from FETC. Well, our bad, but frankly time kept ticking away while other priorities begged for attention to make up for the absence caused by attending said event. Long and short of it is, there are other places to get FETC news, and those are your best bets.

Apple is podcasting many of the keynotes and some of the session speakers. Find these here, and peruse what you missed.

In addition, eSchool News (here) has a fair amount of coverage; they sent a couple of correspondents to the show and while you may have to dig around their site a little, this should be a good jumping-off point for more news about FETC.

Finally, a bit of editorializing: Compared to the last FETC we attended, in 2001, this show was a great deal smaller in scale (exhibits and sessions) and the sessions seemed to be much more focused on specific local districts/state policies that were relatively narrow in perspective, whereas in days of yore the sessions tended toward a broader strategic scope. For example, a session on one-to-one computing focused exclusively on one district's experience (Broward) but never really brought up the more global issues involved. The "tactical" information was helpful, but the "strategic" information was left to the deduction of the attendees.

In short, FETC was a good experience. Not a great one, not a bad one; not a waste of time, but not necessarily a vision- or life-altering experience, either. It was cool, but it didn't rock out to the extent of previous shows.