EDUCAUSE is one conference that I have attended for the last several years. I was not happy that this year’s conference was was scheduled to start on Election Day. I went to our home in CT on Tuesday night and watched the results with my wife, who was pretty nervous, while I was not. As I tweeted that night, In NATE SILVER we trust. It was amazing how close his predictions were to the real results. After listening to the concession speech by Mitt Romney, I went to bed around 1:30 PM. I listened to the fantastic acceptance speech by President Obama only later. The reason I had to go to bed was that I needed to leave home by 3:30 AM to catch my flight to Denver, so I can get there on time to attend a good chunk of the conference. I arrived in Denver to 70 degree weather, while leaving the east coast where it was cold and snowy. The electoral college weighted map of the USA (a cartogram where the scaling is based on different criteria, in this case the electoral college votes) from Mark Newman is on your left. For those of us who are election stats junkies, these kinds of representations are real fun.

I enjoyed the conference very well. Connecting with other colleagues and some vendors was very useful, but the presentations were below par, with the exception of the general sessions. While talking to the colleagues, I felt very good about the various things we are doing at Wellesley.

EDUCAUSE has  made available several presentations here. I strongly encourage you to check them out, especially all three general sessions. I really enjoyed Ed Ayers’ presentation on “Discovery in a Digital World“. Ed is the president of University of Richmond and a historian. He basically makes the case that there are a lot of technologies that can help the teaching and learning process which are not being exploited to their full extent. Ed also made the point that these tools are now easily accessible by the Humanities faculty who can use them in very engaging ways. Unfortunately I had to leave part way through his speech to catch my flight back home. I intend to listen to it again. Please visit the Digital Scholarship Lab at Univ of Richmond to see some fantastic use of map technologies to visualize history.

One of my colleagues highly recommended a presentation titled “MOOCs: The Coming Revolution?” by Daphne Koller & Brian Voss.In the event you didn’t know, Daphne is a co-founder of Coursera and is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. I was not able to attend it, but I plan to listen to it during the weekend. Ellucian (“Banner” company) had a decent presentation about a clear roadmap for their products. For once, I felt like we are getting some clarity to where things are headed.

You have seen me complain about Banner because of its one size fits all philosophy. We have been successful in pulling data out of it and exploiting the data to our advantage in ways that is useful for us. Finally, Ellucian realized that this is where they need to go. So, they are now stratagizing on exposing data using WebServices and APIs which they call XE or Extensible Ecosystem. We will of course believe it when we see it. They also showed some new user interfaces for mobile devices which look very nice. But everything has a price and we need to assess all these options and return on investment.

I participated in a panel in Google booth along with CIOs from Wake Forest, NYU and Case Western. All I can tell you is that we are using Google Apps in ways that others are not! I felt that we are well ahead of the others. I had a few attendees who came to me and wanted to talk to us about our Google LMS and most importantly how we are maintaining the Google memberships through automated scripts.

If you want to know more about the chatter in EDUCAUSE 2012, click here to get a sample of the tweets.

Besides the fact that the temperature in Denver was very favorable, all four of my flights (United) were either on time or early, another rarity.