NECC 2008 in San Antonio, Texas was great this year. For those of you who don't know, NECC is the National Education Computing Conference where the latest in educational technology is displayed and where teachers can share ideas. More than 12,500 teachers/technology coordinators were there plus another 4,500 education vendors. The energy in the conference center was high as crowds packed the more than 1000 sessions. The first keynote of the NECC conference was given by James Suroweicki, the author of "The Wisdom of Crowds" and a dynamic keynoter. It is a great book.

In his keynote, Suroweicki, talked about the brain power of crowds. He defined crowd as "any group of people who can act collectively to make decisions and solve problems." It can be big organizations like a company or governmental agency or small groups like a group of scientists. It can be students in a school and it can also be super large groups like the worldwide users on Google who vote by clicking on the sites they like best and thus push the rankings of the most visited sites to the top of the list. He also talked about the power of the crowds in the success of Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia. He gave an example of horse racing!! and how bettors on horse races invariably pick the winners as a group. Thus the favored horse most often wins the race. He said that "collectively crowds produce a better solution to complicated problems than experts."

Suroweicki talked about the four key qualities that make a crowd smart: 1) diversity--- people bringing a variety of backgrounds to the group 2) independence---the members need to be independent and not worry about what others are thinking 3)decentralization---no one person should be in charge and 4) consolidation of group findings---a method of summarizing the group's opinion.

So how can the wisdom of crowds be best used in education? Suroweicki says that "crowds are best when there's a right answer to a problem or question." Perhaps in a classroom, groups of students working on a problem might come up with a better answer to a problem than an individual student or even the teacher. Perhaps there is some way that crowds could help come up with a solution to the problems that plague education!! Now, wouldn't that be amazing. One of the greatest problems is the dropout rate in high schools which now is an average of 50%. Maybe diverse panels of people could collaborate and come up with some answers for decision makers. Perhaps on those panels, they could include some of the dropouts and some of the valedictorians. Solutions to education problems now reside in the hands of "experts," rarely a diverse group.

Suroweicki said that the "most important lesson is not to rely on the wisdom of one or two experts or leaders when making difficult decisions. That doesn't mean that expertise is irrelevant, or that we don't need smart people. It just means that together all of us know more than any one of us does."

The book is an exciting read; the New York Times book review calls problem solving a "team sport."

* * *

There were two more keynoters at the conference, both great---Mali Bickley/Jim Carleton and Idit Harel Caperton. You can access their talks on eSchoolNews or on the NECC site.

Another highlight of the conference was the EduBloggers conference that ran the day before the conference started. One of their sessions focused on Clay Shirky's new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. It is a book about social order on the Internet---blogs, wikis, Facebook, and other Web.2.0 offerings. He discusses grassroots activism and how the web enables it. He also discusses the success of Wikipedia and the failure of Wikitorial, a Los Angeles Times 2.0 opinion site. Overall people thought the book is a must-read.

Esther Wojcicki is the driving force behind the development of Palo Alto High School’s award-winning journalism program - the largest high school journalism program in the country. She focuses on assessing and improving student learning through low- and high-tech tools.

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