Rob Caron wrote an interesting post yesterday about Continuous Education - the need to continually learn more and more things as industry changes. While it can effect many industries, IT in particular suffers from this to the extreme.

As a developer, it's something that I've known for quite a while now - you have to be continually learning each thing as it comes out, both just to keep on top of the ball and be able to keep up with new ideas and techniques, but also just to keep your employability at an adequate level. For instance, in my pre-dotnet days, my primary language was VB6 (well, and C/C++, but that ruins my example). Maybe it's because I don't want to and haven't looked, but it appears through my rose coloured glasses now that if I never learned .net and was just a VB6 guy, I'd be hard pressed to find many good jobs out there any more.

But anyway, he ends on an interesting point (about TechEd US).

At TechEd this year, it was overwhelming to think of the massive amount of information being conveyed in one week via keynotes, breakout sessions, pre-conference seminars, BoFs, lunch talks, chalk talks, product booths, the partner pavilion, TechEd bookstore, and more. It can be mind numbing.
How do you handle the constant flood of information about new (and existing) products and technologies?

Australian TechEd isn't as big as the US one, of course, but it's still a massive download into your brain. What can we do about keeping track of it all?

Let's start with my story, and we'll see how we go from there.

I've only been to one TechEd before - in 2003. Back then, I had no PDA, I had no laptop, I had no blog, no nothing. I went to as many presentations as I could, trusty pad of paper and a nice black pen in hand. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. Mostly that did work, although as time went by my little scribbles made less and less sense.

This year it'll be a little different.

I've got a blog now. I don't have a laptop, but I have organised to borrow one for the trip. I have a PDA, although sometimes jotting down notes on paper is faster (and probably what I'll be doing - to be completely honest, it's rarely even charged). Each night (or in other rare slack moments) I can type up my notes so that the writing is legible, and I might be able to make sense of it a bit more after a month or two. I doubt there'll be a net connection in the hotel, but if it's true to form I can use the wireless that's available at TechEd to upload it all to my blog, including some reflections and reviews and things.

Fingers crossed, I'll be able to retain a lot more of the stack of information that gets injected into my skull over the week of TechEd.

So what are you going to do to remember it all? Is there something that could be provided at TechEd that would make it easier? Should every single presentation be recorded and be available for download for registered attendees?

I don't know. But I do know that I've got only a month and a half left to get my brain in shape ready to suck in as much as it can :)