I just survived my first NECC (National Educational Computing Conference). This year’s edition was in San Diego (you know, I could get used to living there), and was marked by a separate strand dedicated to Open Source, with talks taking place in the Open Source Pavillion and Playground. The area was organized by Steve Hargadon, who also supplied a ton of old IBM laptops that either booted from the net and were terminal server machines or booted from CD and were FireFox kiosks. In either case, they didn’t have hard drives and to the surprise of many, their performance was excellent.
The talks over the 3 days ranged from Edubuntu (Jeff Elkner) to LTSP (Steve Hargadon), Moodle (3 times, full every time), my Python programming in MS and HS, and a bunch of other FOSS in education topics. Most were pretty well attended, so much so that the organizers tracked Steve down to tell him that the Open Source area clearly needed more space next year. Another sign of the success of the project was that BlackBoard, who had spent a lot in sponsorship, raised concerns with NECC’s organizers about the fact that there were so many Moodle talks. Hmmm… is somebody getting worried?
A big hit was the appearance of Indiana’s Mike Huffman, the guy at the DOE who came up with the idea of using Linux in Indiana schools. He claims 40,000 HS students are currently using Linux machines in Indiana and promises it will be more like 170,000 by one year from now. Mike spoke at our Open Source Birds of a Feather meeting and then joined us for our FOSS dinner out, a great bash at Rei Do Gado, a Brazilian barbecue. In case (like me) you have never been to a Brazilian barbecue, it’s an all you can eat grilled meat fest, with waiters coming to your table to offer different cuts of grilled meat until you order them to stop. Let’s just say it was so good that I didn’t need breakfast or lunch the next day.
In any case, everyone had the feeling that the momentum of Open Source in education was building. You couldn’t hang around the Open Source area, listen to the talks, or attend the meetings without being struck by the feeling, as Tom Hoffman of SchoolTool put it, that “the locomotive of Open Source has started to roll.”
Adding to that was the fact that the Thursday keynote was Negroponte on the One Laptop per Child project and that their booth (right next to us) was mobbed by people. Some wanted to play with the working models (prototype boards, but not in the cases), some wanted to talk to the staff, some just wanted to have their picture taken holding the mockups. It was wild. Since Python is a key part of their software I talked to them about what options they will offer for a Python programming environment. They don’t have one yet, but we have a similar wish list, interestingly. Oh yeah, by the way, the hand crank is gone – they are now talking about some sort of pull string generator on the power brick instead.
My Python programming talk was well received, I think. At least people laughed and nodded in the right places which is about all I could ask for.
