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.
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The summer is winding down and we are all getting ready for the start of yet another academic year. As always, there are noticeable changes that will affect our faculty and students when they get back. Some will see them as welcome changes whereas others will see them as annoyances. In a few cases, the changes we have to make are out of our control, but the users don’t necessarily care. We are getting ready to communicate these changes.
I attended a day long meeting last Monday in Northampton organized by NERCOMP. The program committee which plans the annual conference met in the morning and I was assigned to one of the most boring tracks – Policy, Regulations and Security. We were a fun group so it was OK. One of our tasks was also to come up with the theme and suggestions for keynote speakers for the upcoming conference. Because of the topics I suggested, I may have earned a nickname “The Disruptive Technologist”. No, I was not disrupting the proceedings, but earned the title based on the topics I was suggesting.
During the subsequent discussions, I heard more than once, “Working in Higher Ed is not what it used to be”. I have a feeling that some of what I was proposing prompted the others to mention this to me. I was stressing on the urgency for us to realize that we cannot get too comfortable with what we do, instead, we need to be extremely agile and develop constantly in new areas. I totally agree with this statement. In fact, who wouldn’t? More importantly, isn’t this true everywhere we look? Isn’t it also true that it has always been this way, it is just that it has been accelerating more recently?
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I attended yet another excellent NERCOMP annual conference from March 12-14. I am not saying this simply because Wellesley was very well represented and all of our presentations were VERY well received 🙂 It is a small enough conference where you can establish long lasting partnerships and catch up with others on what is going on. We all wore color coded T-shirts with QR code strategically placed on the back and because the theme was Mardi Gras, wore some beads! “Gold color” represented power – I am a Board member 🙂
I was part of a leadership forum on Monday where we discussed a paper by Clayton Christensen called “Disrupting College“. It is a long 70 page position paper where, Christensen argues that disruptive technologies, especially online learning, should be adopted by the academia soon as a way to reduce the cost of postsecondary education while not compromising on the quality. It is a very interesting read. He also agrees that what he proposes may not be directly applicable to many of the elite institutions, however, not keeping on top of it and developing strategies is highly recommended.
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It has been a terrific day today. The Cricket World Cup that began about six weeks ago came to a fantastic conclusion with a classic game between India and Sri Lanka. Though I was born in Sri Lanka and grew up there, I belong to India, so I support them always and wanted them to win this one. India’s last World Cup win was in 1983.
Sri Lanka put up a total that was considered hard to beat, the legendary opening Indian pair got out early to set up a drama that finally ended in India winning it. Several days of me getting up between 4 AM and 5 AM to watch these games is over. Thanks to advances in technologies, the diehards like us were able to view live cricket through willow tv. Not sure how many simultaneous viewers watched some of these games, but the experience was flawless. After a short nap, it is time to root for UConn Men tonight.
Northeast Regional Computing Program (NERCOMP) is a regional affliate of EDUCAUSE. Many of the Higher Ed institutions from the Northeast and a few from other states such as New York and Pennsylvania are members of NERCOMP. My association with NERCOMP goes several years back in that I have presented several times at NERCOMP SIGs (Special Interest Group meetings) as well as in their annual conferences. I have also been a member of the Program Committee and I was elected in early March (2011) to serve in NERCOMP Board for the next three years. I really like the the NERCOMP annual conference which provides an excellent venue to network and listen to colleagues on topic of direct relevance to what we do.
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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.