After a brief visit to Scripps College , I headed to Orlando to attend the EDUCAUSE annual conference. It was well attended as evidenced by long lines during lunch times. I have never seen such lines before. If you are interested in my tweets during the conference, you can check them out here. If you want to see all tweets with the hashtag #edu14, click here. Though the latter one is long, it is worth reading through some of them or by further filtering based on your interest. I was too tired to tweet after a while because the sessions I went to did not have much for me to tweet and the others were doing a better job.
I always look forward to general sessions at EDUCAUSE. This year the first one was by Clayton Christensen on Disruptive Innovation. The entire talk will be available to the public in 90 days here, unless you have a valid EDUCAUSE account, in which case you should be able to listen now. Since I have heard Christensen a few times before, there was not much here for me. Also, he has had recent health issues, and it showed. He himself mentioned his recent stroke, when he was unable to recall a word during the talk. He mentioned how Higher Ed is in a crisis and unless it is disrupted in some serious fashion, the consequences can be dire. Obviously, recent technologies have already disrupted Higher Ed, but the basic methods of teaching, learning and research have not changed and the indirect message that everyone heard is that we, as technologists, can make a difference here. Perhaps! Also, I was not fond of some of the analogies he presented because they may work for corporate America, but not necessarily in Higher Ed. On the other hand, may be that is the disruption that he was referring to.
Chsitensen was also arguing for more open, modular and interoperable “things” in general. We all, especially me, support this wholeheartedly. However, there was a problem. The slide where this appeared, was copyrighted by him!
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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.
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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