It was about how to get the job done in education. Speaker after speaker got up and moaned about class sizes, work load, paper-work, resources, etc. I got up and spoke my mind. Witnesses told me later I did not wander too far off-topic 
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All over the world, people are struggling with the same issues, trying to do more with less. We have an archaic IT system that was obsolete the day it was installed. Students wait minutes to log in/boot up/find stuff/get to the lab. We spend a ton of money providing electrical power for our system. If we modernized IT and used thin clients we could save enough money to have far better performance and more seats. Students would not need to come to the lab to do routine, daily tasks, except computer courses. Putting PCs from one lab and more PCs in classrooms we could revolutionized the way we work. We could scan/photograph every artifact and keep them in an organized database so our work would be accumulated and the resources grow year by year. Students and teachers need never hunt again for a document that was full-text indexed. A cluster of PCs would serve as a teacher’s aid in every classroom.
The possibilities are endless. Most issues could be improved if we only spend 1% of our annual budget on IT every few years. The thin clients can last 10. The server 5. Mics, speakers, cameras and scanners last as long as you take care of them. Projectors work for 2 or 3 years and need a new bulb. There is plenty of money available if the folks who decide things just put their mind to it. Instead they are trying to spend more on oil to run the generators for IT than on IT itself. Penny wise and pound foolish. We could burn half as much oil and have ten times the IT. Students spend ten minutes every day going to and from the computer lab where they so outnumber the teacher and can hide that they do time-wasting things instead of processing useful information. In the classroom, a teacher can see every monitor at once and teach students to manage time. Now, we teach students to waste time. I estimate we spend less than 0.1% of our budget on IT, just consumables and things that break. Oil is paid by someone else which puts us off the mark in budgeting. We cannot even form an IT committee for fear that a demand for expenditure might arise.
That meeting was not “about how to get the job done in education,” it was a LANGUAGE OF INSTRUCTION meeting, and was called such
and people did not “moan,” they spoke their minds
Language is the major means of communication in education and it helps get the job done.
I used “moan” meaning that most speakers were complaining about lack of resources for the job: money for teachers, time to do the work, texts, etc.
Speakers did speak their mind as did I. Many proposed solutions as did I. IT is a powerful tool in education. For language of instruction, IT may be used to find/index/translate texts. Many of the problems are beyond our control but there are still things we can do to improve education. Even the problems that are beyond our control can be addressed with a concerted effort and collaboration by several groups. In our case, the branch of government paying for energy could subsidize our purchase of higher-performance/more efficient computers and be ahead of the game.