Educause 2006 – day 2

Day 2 started with a presenter breakfast (because of my poster session!) and some rain if memory serves.

I then moved on to perhaps the best presentation I’ve seen in a while at 8:10 AM, Rules of Engagement: Strategic Moves with Technology. Jim Jorstad from UWL (where my mother teaches) gave a dynamic media-filled presentation touching on learning spaces, use of video, and more. It was so engaging I didn’t write much down! He touched on the key current learning space trends. He also showed some great uses of short video clips for education — a time-lapse of building construction. In addition he talked about video conferencing and conferenced-in his colleague from UWL to the session. I wish I had a video of the entire talk.

Next up at 9:30 AM was a general session The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Education and Society with Ray Kurzweil. I didn’t take many notes on this one. He had a lot of graphs that all were showing the same trend (I can’t remember what that was now!). He was also able to predict the development of new technologies. The best part was when he demoed a hand-held camera/reader that can take a picture of something and read aloud the text to the user. Think how this will change the experience of the blind in the world. Text-to-speech tools exist now but are not this compact — you have to go somewhere to have things converted to audio. Imagine a blind person holding this up to a sign and then the sign text is read to them immediately.

Then came the 11:45 AM session, Tell Us What You Want: Lessons in Student-Centered Service Design. They had used different groups, a student outreach group and a student advisory group, to change their services. It had some good suggestions that are worth considering.

The Small Colleges group over lunch got a bit bogged down in the issue of printing. Basically with more things being posted online students are printing more. The usual cost of printing handouts is being moved from the departments to whoever pays for printing (sometimes the institution and sometimes the student). I left a bit early.

Next up at 2:20 PM was a “featured speaker” on From Today’s CMS to Tomorrow’s Learning Support System. You can see a video here. We had a few perspectives on CMS’s. First up was a student with her view on the net gens. Then we had a great exploration of the web 1.0 to web 2.0 move with regards to the CMS. Web 1.0 is a teaching paradigm whereas web 2.0 is a learning paradigm. “CMS 2.0” opportunities were noted: tagging and bookmarking, content management (beyond faculty), collaborative team tools, themes – not courses, peer tutoring collaborations, facebooks not portals, social note taking. Great stuff. I had to leave a bit early to set up my poster session.

I was briefly in the 3:55 PM session, Fear Factor and American Idol: Leveraging Popular Culture for Student Support. I thought I could get enough from the session materials and had to go to my poster session afterwards. Basically during their first year experience course they did some fear factor-like (very safe though) technology challenges on identity theft, securing your computer, copyright, and using their campus resources. I’d like to get more of a presence in our first year experience course too.

After this was my poster session, Moodle for the Masses: Deploying an Enterprise-Wide, Open-Source CMS. I ran out of handouts (I had 70 I think!) and talked non-stop to people. There were many good questions and interest in moodle is still very high. I found some moodle-colored yarn before leaving for the conference to create the links in my poster “diagram” as well as make a moodle “m” to get attention.

Tonight was the Taste of Texas event and tomorrow was my presentation so I turned in early. The event was very Texas-themed as you can see from this flickr picture I found. The food was good.