My NECC Reflection

I'm finally getting around to putting my NECC reflections down on paper, so to speak. Ever since I left the house on my way to the airport, NECC has been on my mind. This post is going to focus on the people. I think we all agree that the people are essential to a great conference. I was hoping to have already posted this, but I ended up spending a lot of Friday refining the original NECC Animoto video. Yesterday was a holiday, so tried to limit my online time. I've received a lot of positive feedback on the video when I first posted it, so maybe pictures do say more than words. I only shared the original version of this video on Twitter, but as I watched it and reflected back on the people of the conference, I had to do a lot of remixing because I left too many people out, needed to change the order of the pics, or because I found other pictures I liked, resulting in the final version, shown above. I wanted the video to really show my experience, connections, and conversations. I didn't take my camera because I knew there would be plenty of others taking pictures. Search Flickr for NECC09 and you'll find thousands of pictures from the show - most taken by Kevin Jarrett. Anyway, I chose the pictures for my video carefully. Rather than go through an extensive list of the people who made NECC memorable (Ben Grey did a wonderful job on this), I wanted to show the people that helped make my conference special. The people shown in the video were people I had a conversation with, the friends I met last year and said hi to again this year, the people who participated in my state project who wanted to connect f2f and the new friends I met. I know I missed some people, and I'm sorry for that. I'd like to think of the video has a sort of thank you for helping make my second NECC a great experience. Smeech, you were right - here's a remix.

This year was the second year I attended NECC and I certainly had a different experience this time around. Last year, I was so overwhelmed, not to mention nervous. I went by myself, knowing only a few Twitter friends. This year was a different story. After spending the last year tweeting more, blogging more, and simply communicating and conversing more with my PLN, it almost felt like a family reunion. It was nice to recognize faces from last year or to be recognized and catch up. One of the comments I received on my video, by Karen Janowski, mentioned that it my video was all about the people. Ya know what? She's right, my video and the conference were about the people. But NECC is also about the content, which be the topic of my next reflection post.