I'm lucky to attend the International Society for Technology (ISTE) in Education's annual conference this week. Especially since, it seems clear, technology in education is now just the way things are done-- you're a backwater if you're not on board.

Some headlines:

ISTE is global and effective

• Membership in 89 countries.
• 79 countries have representatives at this At this year's conference.
• ISTE's National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) have been adopted globally since the last conference, including among G8 nations such as Canada, G20 such as Brazil, and less-wealthy nations such as Costa Rica. Agencies like UNESCO have also adopted.

Educational technology is in the field

• Educational materials are an $8.1 billion business in the USA and digital materials are being given parity to print in the nation's bellwether markets of California, Florida, and Texas.
• At 8:30AM "bring your own laptop" sessions of 50+ were overbooked and with standing-room lines of 15-20. This is for practical topics like using Moodle effectively.
• The crowd at the enormous Colorado Convention Center in Denver carry notebook computers and smartphones like football crowds double-fist beer and hotdogs. It's normal to see pairs doing an awkward tech juggle to free up limbs for handshakes and hugs.

All aspects of "educator" are represented

• The crowd is multi-generational, and multicultural. In fact that's one of the draws, such as the opportunity for new teachers to match their ideas with the pedagogical wisdom of the veterans. And vice versa-- technological lessons from the veterans paired with the methodology insights from fresh graduates.
• These are the front line workers of education. Classroom teachers, administrators, coordinators. Regular folk, many of whom are not IT graduates.

They aren't waiting to be told

• DIY rules the day. 4H is doing robotics contests! The number and breadth of poster sessions is amazing.
• Open source is everywhere. You want a debate about WordPress 3 vs. Drupal vs. Joomla? Come here.

This is particularly heartwarming to myself for a few reasons. First, I believe in high-quality educational materials. This means I have to hang out with publishers a lot. Unfortunately, far too many in publishing are reticent on digital-- the industry is still blaming digital for its own pricing problem. But the high water mark is here and I am confident that any publisher who refuses the now will be washed away. And good riddance.

An example: At a presentation by Discovery this morning, a question was asked: What does a 4-year old textbook think? Of course there were content issues-- a different US president, absence of an African-American president, the absence of the sadly monumental gulf oil disaster, Pluto was still a planet...

But there were deeper comments: that an index is sufficient linking, that images aren't clickable into videos, that page order still matters... Sure, the presentation was sponsored by a corporation with particular interests, but those responses came from an audience who traveled far to sit in a room on a sunny morning and discuss the issue.

The fact is that digital educational materials are not novel anymore. Unless you're at a publisher with a large print catalog and too much capital tied up in the C-suite perks...

Apologies to my publishing peers, but perhaps the loss of several entrenched publishing oligopolies should be welcomed. Consider the breadth of this crowd. This is the "reindeer sweater" demographic, not the ivy-league silicon valley/alley/highway group of self-professed "digerati". Yet they tote laptops because they need personal portable webservers to practice Moodle and Drupal.

They need those webservers because the entrenched market providers failed over decades to feed the need. So these teachers, many who went into the profession for love of liberal arts, not necessarily technology, are doing it themselves.

School districts are crowdsourcing materials and open source software is HUGE. This is so very important because while the entrenched business entitities turned knowledge into a product to create friction for profit, education is inherently a service. And, often without having ever heard of the Cluetrain, armies of teachers have trumped textbook producers with genuine service. I know handfuls of publishing veterans who still can't decide if they want to support social networks. Meanwhile, every ISTE presentation and attendee seems to have a Wikispace or Ning account for themselves, their presentations, and their classes.

It is by this means that we can see the true goal of education happening, summed very well by a true digerati, whose company has a large presence in the exhibition hall:

"Over my lifetime, we are going to go from a small number of people having access to most of the world’s information, to virtually everybody in the world having access to virtually all of the world’s information."
-- Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO