It's really important to hear new ideas, so I spend a fair amount of my time attending conferences where I think this will happen. At the Accelerating Change Conference at Stanford, I heard Ray Kurzweil, who reminded all of us that the change coming in IT is not linear but geometric, which meand that in 40 yrears the power will have increased A BILLION times. Try getting your head around that one. That will be the world of today's students.
I attended the Games-for-Health Conference and the Games-for-Change Conference. Both of these have grown considerably, with more and more people wanting to get into the space as users of games to reach their audiences.
Project Inkwell, the initiative for one-to-one computing whose board I am on held a conference in Maine where we got to hear former Governor Angus King (who started the Maine laptop program and who joined our board) and we got to tour the Maine schools. One thing it showed is that the move to one-to-one will necessitate much better software -- we'd better get cracking!
Finally I had the unexpected pleasure of hearning much of the sold-out PopTech conference in Camden Maine via free podcast (courtesy of ITConversations.com). The theme this year was "Grand Challenges" and they covered a lot of them. Among the most interesting to me were Roy Bunker's talk on his Barefoot College in India, and Neil Gershenfeld's talk on Fab-Labs, where people around the world learn to do digital fabrication related to their lives and work for surprisingly little money. The talks will all become available on IT Conversations.
Posted by Marc at October 23, 2005 12:43 PM