TechEd 2008 - Eracism

I got this shirt for working at a conference.
When my Mom and I went to the TechEd conference a few years back we did a presentation on visual literacy together. They gave out these shirts there.
http://www.techedevents.org/
It's a navy blue shirt with heavy/thick ink on it. Since these were leaning on the one size fits most side, it ended up being an extra large =\ I wear shirts like this anyway because they're free lol.
On the front of this shirt is their logo and tagline "TechEd 2008 - The Hands-on Conference." They are a group of educators trying to help the field get in touch with technology by utilizing new breakthroughs and trends. Basically, empowering the classroom experience. The back of the shirt is a slogan that they support as well, "Eracism" basically meaning erase racism. An effort to stamp out racism in educational settings. It is a good conference for seeing new tech, gadgets and software.
Honestly, no one knows about this conference, it would be like, "Hey, TechEd, nice!" But it's a pretty solid shirt -and it was free- so it's just in my standard group and comes up every once in a while. I suppose what I really enjoy about this TechEd shirt that it's rare. They only printed so many of them for that one 2008 conference, and you are in a special -really random- group of people if you have one. Also, it's a good/healthy conversation starter: "Ohh what's TechEd?" I could reply, "It's this conference I went to where we collaborate about new technological and educational advancements. I gave a presentation there." It gives the impression that I'm intellectual, on the edge of technology and am doing generally good things. It not a bad shirt, it's just kind of obscure.

At that conference I was walking around the vendor hall, chatting up random vendors and sales people, -they'll talk your ear off just in case you're someone important- when I met this author. She was a middle-aged woman who wrote children's books for this larger publisher. Her name was Kathleen Duey and we started up a conversation about plots, allusions and recurring themes in literature. We ended up walking for a while, sitting down and talking for an hour or two. It was fascinating talking with someone who grew up reading stories and has this whole different perspective on modern entertainment and narrative than I do. Back then, I was fairly into anime and we had an awesome -civil and intellectual- East vs. West argument; everything from Harry Potter to Megaman. It was super fun but we parted ways after the conference and I never heard from her again =|
http://www.kathleenduey.com/