It’s been 20 years since my first NYSCATE Conference. The changes in that time have been remarkable. I’ve attended a number of sessions and most have been very interesting. Although I’ve seen no presentations on open source per se but I have seen a number of presentations where the applications are on the web and they are PHP served applications and most likely those applications are run on Apache servers. While Google is not open source, it is hosted on open source data centers. Great buzz here about Google Apps for Education. Twitter is huge in Educational Technology circles and it’s yet another open source based application.
The growth of iPads has been phenomenal. Very few attendees carry notebooks or even netboks anymore. Almost everyone has an iPad. Almost everyone has a smart phone and while many conference goers sport iPhones, many more are carrying Android based phones. Interactive white board vendors are more numerous and there must be at least a dozen separate vendors.