Well another Educause annual conference has come and gone. It’s been a few years since I attended the annual conference so it was a joy to return. There were more sessions that I wanted to attend than I could attend. Several time slots had multiple presentations that I wanted to see. With more and more sessions recorded I can catch some of those later. My priorities this year were student success (retention/advising), analytics and vendors. We are implementing Hobsons Retain/AgileAdvisor/AgileGrad suite which includes a CRM (retain), case management advising (AgileAdvisor) and a degree planner (AgileGrad). I was also recently on the team architecting a reboot of our institutional research operation that will be the Office of Planning and Effectiveness so analytics are of particular interest.
The conference kicked off with an entertaining and engaging talk by Sir Ken Robinson. This article captures much of the talk. The very telling video (below) shows one of his points, how you stifle innovation by asking the wrong questions.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TskeE43Q1M]
Returning to my “then and now” theme I used the The Minnesota Historical Society database as source material again and looked at the area of north 1st street and 1st avenue north — 1st and 1st. Look at my previous post to see what this is about. Enough talk — on to the pictures!
The hunt’s building still stands, just a bit smaller and without the chimneys. The building on the left is gone and the main building is not as long –count the windows. The back was shaved off at some point. The trees are a nice addition.