The Mid-Pacific ICT Center (MPICT) is hosting their Winter ICT Educator Conference in San Francisco on January 7-8, 2010.

For the second year in a row, the National and Mid-Pacific ICT Centers are joining forces to offer a Winter ICT Educator Conference.

The event will feature presentations from industry sources of ICT educational resources and from the NCICT and MPICT educator communities on quality ICT educational practices.

U.S. Community College educators in ICT-related programs are invited to attend this event FREE, with the possibility of receiving a stipend or partial expense reimbursement.

Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) is an umbrella term, widely used outside the United States and in the United Nations, to encompass all rapidly emerging, evolving and converging computer, software, networking, telecommunications, Internet, programming and information systems technologies.

Improvements to deployed ICT technologies, infrastructure, systems and solutions, and people’s abilities to productively use them, are strategically important issues to individuals and organizations of all kinds – and to local, state, national and global economies.

To enhance education initiatives in this field, the National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program has awarded a 4 year, $3 million grant to establish the Mid-Pacific ICT (MPICT) Center, at City College of San Francisco.

MPICT’s mission is to coordinate, promote and improve the quality of ICT education, with an emphasis on 2-year colleges, in a region consisting of northern California, northern Nevada, southern Oregon, Hawaii and the Pacific Territories.

To accomplish this mission, MPICT launched with 4 Regional Partner schools: Ohlone College, Cabrillo College, Foothill College and Santa Rosa Junior College, which together with City College of San Francisco’s Computer Networking and Information Technologies (CNIT) and Computer Science (CS) departments, represent the San Francisco Bay Area.  In the Fall of 2009, MPICT added a new Regional Partner school, Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, NV, which adds connections to ICT programs at all 4 Nevada community colleges through the NSF funded NVITE project.