I am here at the Richmond International Airport waiting to get back to Boston after a fabulous conference. This year the CLAC (Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges) annual conference was held at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA. The campus is beautiful and the hosts were gracious and extremely helpful and the overall experience was just fabulous.

There is nothing better than a gathering of committed higher ed professionals who work in institutions that are very similar. All the member institutions are small liberal arts colleges and there is a lot of similarities in terms of what we are trying to accomplish and the challenges we face. And we are very open and are not afraid to share. So, it was a lot of fun.

I think you should check out the tweets from those of us who tweeted during the conference for a sense of how we all felt about the conference. To see the ones I did, click here.

The first keynote by Gabriel Dance was fantastic. He is a “multimedia journalist” and he showed us some of his work for NY Times and Guardian. Most of what he showed us is available here and I suggest you look at the powerful use of interactive graphics to convey the various stories. The takeaway for us is the parallel between what we are trying to do in our own campuses through digital scholarship and his works. In our case, the question we have to ask is how can we use technologies to improve teaching and learning and make the content more engaging. He highlighted the pitfalls of some of the interesting technologies not being available after a period of time and also the so-called “link rot” where by as time progresses, due to a variety of reasons links no longer work. Gabriel stressed the importance of thinking about these at the get go!

The second keynote was about how to be prepared against cyber attacks by Israel Martinez and Richard Schroth. This is an extremely important topic and one that we constantly worry about. However, it was not clear that the speakers understood the kind of institutions we are and how we should prepare against such threats. This seemed to be the general consensus of some of the colleagues I checked.

I attended a few more sessions and was a panelist in one. Our session was well attended and we had excellent discussions. I attended a session about faculty development and how six liberal arts colleges in NY are handling this. It was good to hear the various approaches and feel that we are in a great place on this one. At the same time I was talking in my panel, Rachael Coombes from Wellesley was also presenting about the use of Analytics at the College. From what I heard, she did a terrific job!

A couple of other things that were great to know about was the IQ center at Washington and Lee. What they are doing is a bit of our makerspace like activities, QAI and more. One of the IQ center staff member flew a drone to take a group picture of all the attendees. He was pretty skilled and courageous. The drone did not fall down on us!

The other thing that I would like to follow up on is iRODS, an open source software that acts as a front end to present various file systems in a unified way. Though it can do more, Swarthmore is using it to provide an easy to use front end to storage for faculty in Amazon’s S3. Since Amazon S3 interface is not the easiest to use, iRODS presents that in a simplified fashion. In our case, we can potentially make all the files stored in NTM, Vault, Academic storage we provide to the faculty, all appear to the faculty member as a single file system. We will explore this to see if it is worth pursuing.

I also wrote emails to some of the LTS staff about a few other ideas for us to check out. The same way, many of my colleagues will be contacting me and others in LTS for a variety of information that interested them during our conversation. I am energized and ready to go!