Last week I attended the annual conference of EDUCAUSE, the organization of Higher Ed technology organizations. It was attended by some 8000 professionals and vendors. The meeting was held in Anaheim, CA. I am happy to say that I was pleased with the meeting this year. You can see my tweets during the conference here.

I joined a few colleagues for a dinner to celebrate the retirement of a long term CIO from a small liberal arts college. This colleague is a terrific individual and though I have seen him in the liberal arts college gatherings and EDUCAUSE over the years, I have gotten to know him only in the past 6 years or so. He is a true leader who is a champion for collaboration and has taught us many things about how to be successful in collaborations. We will miss him very much. The dinner conversation was terrific and many attendees reminisced about the good old times (as in the ’80s and ’90s).

The two keynotes were very interesting. Wednesday began with “Quiet: How to Harness the Strengths of Introverts to Change How We Work, Lead, and Innovate” by Susan Cain. This talk was about how introverts can make significant contribution to an organization and be leaders of an organization. Susan provided some key examples of leaders who are introverts. She also presented a case about how an appropriate extrovert-introvert (Ying-Yang)  relationship can result in terrific success. If you are interested in learning more, I suggest you read this post by Ben Woelk from Rochester Institute of Technology, which he wrote before Susan’s talk. The basic message is simple “people are different & harness their strength by accommodating their style”. It was an enjoyable talk, though I had some issues with what was being said (see my tweets).

I am very happy to say that we have a good mix of introverts and extroverts who work well together in LTS. I had an issue with the talk in terms of the generalization of “introverts” or “extroverts”. I feel that it is highly contextual. Believe it or not, early in my career, I came out as an introvert during the classic Myers-Briggs type of evaluations. The real reason behind this had a lot to do with the culture I grew up in and an identity crisis (someone who is a computational chemist working in an IT department). Many of the typical introvert criteria didn’t fit me at all, but this is how I was perceived. But, over a period of time I have become more of an extrovert (some feel I am extreme!!!). Similarly, even today, amongst a group of personal friends I am seen as “reserved” or an introvert, but in many other settings I am not. So, my point is, a single label doesn’t always work.

I attended some of the most interesting sessions that are not the typical technology talks. One on cognitive computing was really interesting. This talk illustrated how the power of computing can be harnessed to assist neuroscientists in understanding human cognition. This in turn can be used to tailor the learning in way that is beneficial to a learner. Satya Nitta from IBM talked about how the lessons learned are finding their ways into IBM Watson.

The keynote on Thursday was delivered by Sugata Mitra on the Future of Learning. It was a fascinating talk about a little experiment to see how the children in a slum in New Delhi reacted to the availability of a computer. It turns out that left to themselves, as a group, they can learn a lot. Mitra led such experiments across the globe to come to the same conclusion. As he said, the mere presence of adults turns the children off and they are less likely to fiddle with things and learn. The message from this talk was that children learn as a group on their own if the adults simply facilitated an environment where they can learn and leave them alone.

It was an interesting contrast from the “Quiet Revolution” where the Cain referred to research showing that collaborative brainstorming tends to be less productive than individuals working alone. Similarly, Mitra gave an example of asking the children about “being in two places at the same time” which resulted in them finding the answer in quantum tunneling & entanglement on the web. He used this as an example of the children “learning”. As someone who is familiar with these concepts, I would not equate “finding” something on the web in 30 minutes to actually “learning” about the concepts.

Both speakers tended to use gross generalizations to make their points and the reality is somewhere in between. For a critique on Cain’s point of view, click here.

I am back and we are in the last stages of the Workday project, so there is a lot to do. Talking about Workday, we also got to see the student module of Workday, which is coming along really nicely.

The constant stream of breaking news about the candidates for the presidential election is both sickening and amusing (hmmm… could this be the same particles in my brain are in two states at the same time? Quantum Tunneling?). One more week to go and I have no idea what I will do for entertainment after that. Please vote!!!