In today’s podcast, I discuss the next best thing to attending NECC – having others attend NECC.
Earlier this year there was a contest where the winners would get to attend the National Educational Computing Conference for free. As the conference is being held in San Diego this year, I was very interested.
I didn’t win.
But no matter, for through the power of RSS and tags I’m getting write-ups, interviews, photos, and more delivered to me as they happen.
This is one of the great things about the edu-blogosphere. If at least one of us attends a conference and blogs about it, podcasts about it, or simply takes some pictures and posts them on Flickr, the rest of us can attend that conference THROUGH that person.
Lucky for me, there’s more than one blogger hanging out at NECC this year.
David Warlick, Steve Dembo, and Will Richardson are all there, along with others. The first full day of the conference isn’t even over yet, and already I had to pull myself away from my Bloglines account just so I could do today’s podcast.
Of particular note is David Warlick’s latest creation, HitchHikr. Like most websites that have vowels conspicuously absent from their names, this thing is really cool. It makes use of tags to collect postings related to the conference of your choice, and feeds them to you in a quick, easy to scan through summary. It even includes a column of the most recent Flickr photos from that conference, so this morning when I checked it I was greeted with a boatload of fireworks photos courtesy of Steve Dembo.
(To all of my readers in the US: hope you had a great 4th of July.)
Now it’s worth noting that without tags Hitchhikr is useless, so the more bloggers who start tagging their postings and podcasts, the more robust Hitchhikr will be. This is something that can only get better.
…I just have to get up off of my butt and figure out how to add tags to my own posts.
Technorati Tags: necc necc06 Hitchhikr Flickr David Warlick podcast