OK, the image of an attendee on the left summarizes EDUCAUSE 2011 very nicely. It could be interpreted as extremely boring (thereby sleep inducing) by some. Or that one had so much fun in Philly that it induced sleep in the afternoon. I will be honest and say I favor the first theory- I derive very little from user contributed sessions in EDUCAUSE. Most are on topics that you already know enough about and don’t directly apply to a small liberal arts college like ours. So, why do I go, you may ask.I look at EDUCAUSE as having four major components – Networking, Keynotes, Vendor Exhibits, User contributed talks. I have ordered them in order of value to me. Ha, then there are user sponsored parties. I have gone to Google parties for the past several years. They are so much fun that I never leave them till the end because it is a great networking event.

I met so many people during the four days I was there (I was there cor a CLIR meeting on Monday; CLIR is an organization of all merged Library-IT organizations) – many that I already know that I have not connected for a while and several new folks. This gives me a venue to talk about the great things we have been doing and we plan to do moving forward and also learn from them on what they all are up to. Many were surprised by all the things we have been doing and our ongoing plans.

Google’s party (by invitation only) was held at the Academy of Natural Sciences great as always. The foods were delivered in real fun ways and the company was great. I met the IT Director from Trinity College in Dublin and talked about my recent visit there. And of course, I met my colleagues from Pace and heard about all the progress they have been making during the past year. I therefore give an A+ on networking during the conference.

A colleague from another Liberal Arts College at the Google party was taking a lot of notes about our Library Tab, the PHP SSO that is enabling us to develop PHP apps that can easily be connected to the portal, and Mobile Apps strategy at Wellesley. Made me so happy to see this and kudos to everyone at LTS who is making all these possible! Here is to Collaboration in Action!

Keynotes get a B. Frankly, Seth Godin was brilliant (a definite A) , saying a lot of what we already know, but in a very open way. He had great slides like the ones you see here, weaved into his talk.  You see, he is an author and blogger! He does not have to report to anyone at the end of the day, so he can say these things in public fora. Several things he said resonated well with me – “Higher Ed cannot be complacent; Encourage creativity in whatever people are capable of; Forget about dependence on training because it makes people follow rules and be less creative (Right on the money!!!);” Especially one thing he mentioned about online courses and creativity. Just recording what happens in the classroom and posting it for others to consume doesn’t work because 90% of learning happens outside that classroom. Students usually get “stuck” when they listen to lectures or studying a particular topic. An online lecture needs to be accompanied by activities to “unstuck” learners. In real life, discussions with classmates, a whole slew of other support systems (eg. research librarians, tutors, class deans etc. etc.) help the student get “unstuck”.

There were many things he said that either doesn’t apply to us or a large group of us. I will spare you the details. One thing I did not agree with was that as IT leaders we can change the future of our institutions. I think we can certainly play a part but almost everyone I spoke to agreed that this is a stretch.

I was really looking forward to Danah Boyd’s talk. It was so disappointing. Not worth talking about. B-

Vendor exhibits were really tiresome – there was nothing that was exciting, really! I stopped at a few. I took objections to vendors having people performing silly card tricks as a way to attract us to stop there. Pens, T-shirts, glowing balls – It all felt silly. Not many people were falling for this. I met with a few whose products I was really interested in. Pearson who announced an LMS using Google Apps didn’t have enough details, so I was a bit disappointed. I also had several one on one meetings with four vendors where I learned a great deal about their products and I prefer these over sitting in silly chairs and forced to hear their propaganda to either receive a T-shirt (which is a cheap marketing device for them)  or enter a raffle to win an iPad. C would be my grade, but, in all honesty, we depend so much on many of them, they have a job to do and they contribute to the conference, so it is a B.

User presentations – very disappointing. I went to a few which reminded me of how efficient TED talks are. Many repetitions of the same themes “collaborate, cloud computing, campus governance etc.” which are probably very valuable to newcomers. From my perspective, this is definitely a C. I tweeted that EDUCAUSE should collaborate with TED and cut the talks short.

Barron Koralesky from Macalester College told me about their Microlectures. Fascinating stuff and something for us to follow up on.

You can add up the final score 🙂