8:10 am, Closer to the Dream: Letting Pedagogy Transform Learning Management Systems
Day 2 starts with the session I’m convening on moodle. People should try convening at Educause, it’s great fun. Also this year Educause is doing online session evaluations. HOORAY. They were so easy to do. I never liked the paper versions (I wonder why?). The session went very well and people had many questions. The room was packed to overflowing. The speakers were mobbed afterwards and they were interviewed for a podcast as well.
9:30 am, General Session : Dynamic Stability – Sponsored by Campus Management Corporation, An EDUCAUSE Silver Partner
Unfortunately this session was as weak as the previous day’s general session. It sounded a lot like an ad for Ohio State. I spent most of the time planning a proposal for next year’s conference — stay tuned!
11:45 am, How E-Learning Policies Can Reduce Faculty Workloads and Keep E-Learning Courses Running Smoothly
I was interested in this one from the description. As she started to explain her background she mentioned she had published details already in an EQ article last year. I had read that article already! I left early since I didn’t think the talk would go beyond the article. I have since realized that I saw her last year too!
12:45 pm, Lunch, Small Colleges Constituent Group
Strangely this year we were scheduled in a traditional lecture room. We’re usually in small tables for easy discussion. The room layout made it harder to talk to other people not right next to you. We did the usual straw polls on printing, CMS, help desks and resnet. In general the discussion was good and it’s always helpful to hear how other places like you do things.
2:20 pm, Reminiscences of an Accidental Programmer – Ann E. Stunden
This was the first featured speaker I’ve gone to (I think). She’s the CIO at UW Madison and winner of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Award for Leadership in the Profession. Her talk was better than any of the main keynotes. She mainly traced her accidental entry into programming (a place was hiring for 2 positions, on a whim she took the logic test for programmer position and did superbly and was offered the job, then she asked what a programmer does). She was a great speaker and had so many interesting stories. She showed a photo from a 1972 database manager conference — 20 guys in suits and her in a white dress. I wish there was more time for her to talk. She wove pictures and music to be bridges between her stories — great stuff.
3:55 pm, Drywall, Wireless, and Course Management: Rethinking the Campus Learning Environment
U of Chicago presented their history of labs in 5-year increments. They looked at the speed at which they added classroom resources (very many very fast in spurts) and where they added them on campus. They brought up the trend for more individual or informal learning spaces. They also noticed a rise in CMS usage as their demand for media classrooms rose. Faculty were moving from PowerPoint to using the CMS as the organizer for class presentations. They noted the intersections of the physical, virtual, and infrastructure pieces of the learning environment. The question of “if everything is online, why go anywhere?” was discussed. Several reasons were noted — access to resources (DVD burner), contextualize the activity (I’m doing homework now), reinforce the behavior, collaboration with peers, be seen. Their current project involves students designing spaces for students. It was pretty specific to U Chicago but brought up good points in planning spaces.
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