I think this article should earn Matt an imaginary invitation to present his work at a fake educational technology conference I'm pretending to begin planning. The working title is "Why doesn't all this "stuff" work? 2004." The imaginary theme is "Cheap, robust technologies to make the computers actually work in your school." Or something like that. Topics would hypothetically include Rendezvous, K12LTSP, LDAP, RSS, weblogs and wikis, wifi, when to use PHP, where you can use Python, how to buy gear on EBay, how to figure our what's wrong with and return that new computer that crashes intermittently but persistently but passes all the manufacturer's diagnostics, etc. I'll round up some imaginary sponsors at NECC.

Tom starts off by pointing to a review of USB pen drives and then proposes a conference for the ed-tech community geared toward making all this wonderful technology work. I'm hoping to help him round up sponsors at NECC in New Orleans later this month... Maybe some of the ISTE 40 or so...