After a brief visit to Scripps College , I headed to Orlando to attend the EDUCAUSE annual conference. It was well attended as evidenced by long lines during lunch times. I have never seen such lines before. If you are interested in my tweets during the conference, you can check them out here. If you want to see all tweets with the hashtag #edu14, click here. Though the latter one is long, it is worth reading through some of them or by further filtering based on your interest. I was too tired to tweet after a while because the sessions I went to did not have much for me to tweet and the others were doing a better job.

I always look forward to general sessions at EDUCAUSE. This year the first one was by Clayton Christensen on Disruptive Innovation. The entire talk will be available to the public in 90 days here, unless you have a valid EDUCAUSE account, in which case you should be able to listen now. Since I have heard Christensen a few times before, there was not much here for me. Also, he has had recent health issues, and it showed. He himself mentioned his recent stroke, when he was unable to recall a word during the talk. He mentioned how Higher Ed is in a crisis and unless it is disrupted in some serious fashion, the consequences can be dire. Obviously, recent technologies have already disrupted Higher Ed, but the basic methods of teaching, learning and research have not changed and the indirect message that everyone heard is that we, as technologists, can make a difference here. Perhaps! Also, I was not fond of some of the analogies he presented because they may work for corporate America, but not necessarily in Higher Ed. On the other hand, may be that is the disruption that he was referring to.

Chsitensen was also arguing for more open, modular and interoperable “things” in general. We all, especially me, support this wholeheartedly. However, there was a problem. The slide where this appeared, was copyrighted by him!

The second general session talk was on leadership by Doris Kearns-Goodwin. Again, I have heard her before and though I loved to hear the stories she had to say, there was nothing new there. On the other hand, I completely understand that she cannot just make up stories about dead presidents as a highly respected presidential historian. Many in the audience found it disturbing that she was reading from paper. One quipped –  “She could have just distributed it to all of us and have us read it”. I don’t agree with this. However, she spoke so fast, it was like an express train on steroids. I badly wanted the “slow down” control that I see on the videos on MOOCs (though, I have only used the speed up button so far!) She mentioned a few traits of the successful presidents such as admitting mistakes. I wondered whether they did more of this in their last term than the first, because it is easy to do in the last term!

The biggest news while we were in one of the talks was the announcement by Google about “Unlimited storage“.  Soon, those of us who are Google Apps for Education customers will benefit from not having to worry about storage. Most of the leaders from schools that are Google Apps customers welcomed this news. Many of us are struggling to figure out the most economical way to provide “near line” storage for our faculty and this will certainly help. Near line storage can be thought of as the storage where faculty can save their work after all the processing is complete, yet they may need to get to it quickly later. Drive storage would be perfect for it. Questions such as, how Google is able to do this and why, arose in some people’s minds. These were the same questions that were raised when Google began offering GMail for free to educational institution and later, when they continued to increase space. I believe that this was done to counter the recent Microsoft announcement of 1 TB of storage for OneDrive.  And in reality, most users won’t use the so-called “Unlimited storage”. Also, the storage is becoming cheaper by the day.

“Data Analytics and Business Intelligence” was everywhere. There were plenty of presentations about “Big Data”. Wait, some want to call it “Fast Data” and some “small data”. Whatever! I was totally taken aback by statements like “You really don’t need all of the data stored in big data to be able to understand how a student learns and help the student” and speaker gave examples such as the student’s background. I totally disagree with this idea.

There were several exciting things I saw, such as Salesforce’s advancement software. It is a customer relationship management system that is so well designed by folks who understand engagement. If you could record all the chatter amongst higher ed leadership and do a word cloud, “Workday” will stand out. Everyone feels “stuck” in their current administrative systems and wants to move to modern, fully hosted systems such as Workday, but finding it hard to make the case. So, there were a lot of idea sharing amongst the leaders on strategies for this.

The best part for me was meetings with colleagues and sharing ideas and what each of us are up to. Everyone is doing digital scholarship, document imaging, makerspaces, drones, blended learning etc. So we are in great company.

But wait, no talk of MOOC at the conference! I did proudly tweet about our MOOC on Shakespeare that started on Oct 1. All indications are that it is off to a great start. I began a MOOC on Aeronautical Engineering, but decided not to continue because I don’t like the way it is being taught. However, my goal to learn how aircrafts fly was achieved. Now on, every time I fly, I will be doing mental calculations on Lift, Weight, Thrust and Drag!  I am taking another one on machine learning, which I am deeply interested in. The issue is that I have to listen to two 1 1/2 lectures every week. I like the short videos followed by quizzes and learn a lot more that way. I plan to hang in there a bit longer and see how it goes. The faculty member is a bit more engaging in this course.

Now, on to other things!