I attended the NERCOMP annual conference from 3/24 till 3/26. It is one of my favorite gatherings (Newly constituted NERCOMP band that you see in the image entertained us). This year, we had record attendance of 725.  We had two highly entertaining keynotes – one by Jeff Borden from Pearson and the other by Bryan Alexander from NITLE. Jeff talked about the connection between neuroscience, learning  design and educational technology and how we can learn from brain research and psychology and use the emerging technologies to deliver better learner experience. Through a simple exercise of asking us all to get up and stand on one leg with arms spread, he proved that a whole bunch of us were drunk at 10 AM. There may be some truth to it! You can see a conversation with Jeff here. Bryan laid out various trends in technology and higher education nicely and made it a point to remind the audience that predictions by humans generally are worse than those based on throwing of darts or, plain random predictions. You can see a conversation with him after his talk here.

The big question in the minds of most of us in the audience is “This all sounds great and we are on board. But, whats next? How do we bring along the others such as the faculty, students and the administration to buy into all of this?”.

I sampled several very informative sessions. The session on flipping the classroom by Thomas Menella (Baypath College) was very good and you can access his presentation material here.  If you are interested, please watch the Prezi presentation which provides in great detail what Thomas does for the class. It was funny to hear him describe how they have mock trials about DNA mutation. Students are grouped together – for, against and a jury – to decide whether the DNA is guilty or innocent of mutation (or at least that is how I understood it). I was not there for the student presentations, but based on the tweets that I saw, looks like they really learned a lot from this.

Of course, we all tweeted a lot and you can see them here.  If you are interested seeing all of mine, click here.

I also attended a presentation by Len Peters from Yale who was describing how they have moved from “chaos to service excellence“. It was very obvious that a lot of work has gone into creating various metrics and dashboards that are used to track how the various services are operating, having a good handle on the portfolio of systems and software that are being used etc. It was very impressive. As you can see from my tweet, I was curious to know what the return on investment is. We have gotten much better in service delivery and measurements, but the latter still remains a bit chaotic!

I was so looking forward to the presentation titled “Social Media Liability” by Nick Barnes from Nichols College, who is a faculty member, an attorney and interested in technology. I thought he will talk about social media policies and how one sets them up to avoid liability etc.  I was disappointed because most of the talk was about the varied uses of social media and the potential pitfalls. We all have heard these stories (“don’t tweet that you are going on vacation because that opens the door to your house”) that this is not the most interesting part. We, at Wellesley, are in the process of drafting some social media guidelines, as opposed to policies and this is not easy. So I was looking for some pointers. Some things discussed seemed not practical. Tracking where the students are, through the location based services was discussed. When I asked “Well, this seems like hypocrisy to me. We blame the facebooks of the world doing the same, but how could we do this”. The answer was “well, we will inform the students that if they befriend us, we will or may do this type of tracking”. I believe facebook also tells us this and how many of us read the details? Secondly, if you say this explicitly, may be not many students will befriend you. I am all for the use of institutional social media use, but mainly for communicating what we would like the students to see as well as hear from them feedback. Anything more, especially tracking them, is a bit of a reach! Besides, who is going to do it?

Wellesley had several presentations. One on the use of Omeka and one on open access policy. The LTS staff presenting these made us proud. I participated in two panels, one on MOOCs and another on security assessment, both of which went very well. I was a bit upset about the MOOC panel because the three presenters had agreed to 10 minutes each and I stuck to my 10 minutes – honor code! However, the next presenter was going on and ignored the convener’s signs and took 18 minutes. Of course, I immediately tweeted and the convener apologized (she is a friend) and granted me more time during question and answer. The security assessment panel went very well also.

I really enjoyed the presentation on VDI by Roger Williams University. It is a bold experiment that is paying off. We have not been able to get this off the ground for one reason or the other and we need to ramp this idea up soon.

I am no longer a Board member of NERCOMP. I am done! It was a great experience and I thoroughly enjoyed being one. I set myself up to be a one term Board member, so I am done and paved the way for others to have this valuable experience. It is an extremely well run organization with such dedicated group of individuals running the Board and other activities. I plan to be connected very much to the organization and continue my voluntary contributions.

I also met a bunch of new people, chatted with colleagues from Pace University and Wesleyan, where I worked before. Enjoyed the dinner hosted by Workday. All in all, I had a blast and was tired from all the socializing. Napped yesterday afternoon for 2 hours and was fresh and ready for….

American Idol!