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.
With Wilma looming as an unknown, Educause 2005 began.
8:15 am, General Session : Welcome to the Participation Age
Scott McNealy was funny at times. But it seemed more like an ad for Sun. And I don’t think he adjusted for the fact we’re from higher education — he didn’t seem to “get” the audience. It was a rather disappointing start.
10:30 am, Listening to the Client: Connecting IT and the Academy
While this was a good session, it was clearly aimed at institutions that have an almost hostile relationship with their IT departments. This cast IT in a very service-oriented position with respect to the campus and the users. At Augsburg we’re far more collaborative and tend to lead on some initiatives or at least participate fully. The need for data-driven analysis over “death anecdote” was useful. It was also good to point out that IT is a young member, 30 years, of the academy. MIT noted their repeated survey process. Stanford contracted with a survey company. Much info can be found here.
11:40 am, Sharing Learning Designs: Building the LAMS Community Web Site
I was planning to go to Beyond Chalk but felt I had my fill of surveys and made a sudden change to this session. This was perhaps the best session this year I saw. I first heard of LAMs back in May when it was announced it would be integrated with moodle. I thought it was neat, but didn’t really get LAMs yet. In this session we saw the presenter build a LAMs learning design in a minute and had us go through it (many of us had laptops). To understand LAMS you have to understand what they mean by learning designs. A learning design is a sequence of collaborative learning activities. Some activities involve solo work and others are group work. Typically an assessment piece happens at the end. The presenter built a basic linear LD made up of a question, a vote (survey), a discussion and a chat with us in random groups. This was all built with a graphical drag-and-drop interface and looked really easy. It’s mainly flash-driven. The instructor view was very nice — you could monitor where people were in the LD. It was really cool. I think LDs have some great potential for web-based instruction. They beat learning objects because LDs are easily modified and customized by faculty. Learning objects tend to be more closed and “finished” and not easily adapted. He also mentioned the new community site for sharing LDs.
12:30 pm Lunch
Lunch was lunch. Caught up on emails. There was a lack of beverages available — I suspect there is some rule with the convention center that events couldn’t provide them. There were A LOT of pop machines available though! Interestingly the machines took credit cards, nice.
2:15 pm, Instructional Technologists Constituent Group
This was the first meeting of this new group. A lot of time was spent trying to figure out what the group is. There are a lot of different backgrounds and positions in the group. Some people were alone in their role at their institution, some were part of a larger team. A list of key questions was generated. There was good discussion about pedagogy, technology, instructional design, advocacy vs agency, teaching faculty, gaming, products vs philosophy — things were all over the place. I ducked out to go to a session and missed a small-group breakout. I’m looking forward to see what this group becomes. One person who oversees another group mentioned it took 2 years to define the other group. This was a first meeting of more to come.
3:50 pm, When Space Becomes More Than A Place
This session focused a lot on process and issues with planning. One key concept for me was to “build to pedagogy” rather than have a “built pedagogy.” It was important to design a flexible space that doesn’t force a single pedagogy. Emory University’s Cox Hall was noted as a recent good design. Darmouth’s Collaborative Facilities site was also noted as a resource.
I arrived a few days early with my spouse (also attending from her institution) to do some touristy things. Man, the International Drive area is a strange place. Everything is big, artificial, and tourist-centered. There seemed to be a repating theme of not level buildings (1, 2). Our hotel was not the best Educause hotel we’ve been to. First the advertised wireless barely reached our room and second it wouldn’t connect to any site (DNS errors). It was fixed by Wednesday but was frustrating nonetheless. We wound up sneaking into an adjacent hotel’s patio to use their wireless one night. Also, on the first day our room door wouldn’t lock. We called the desk and they sent a technician over — a guy with WD-40. He sprayed the lock and it worked. The next day the lock wouldn’t open. The same guy came with the same can of WD-40. A few sprays and it worked! After that the lock worked fine for the rest of our stay.
We spent an afternoon at Universal Studios Florida. The movie attractions were rather fun. Unfortunately Jaws was not open and I had wanted to see that one most (I remember Jaws from Universal Studios California when I was a child and was looking to relive that experience). After the conference we went to Epcot since my spouse visited that when she was a child. This was Friday and the rain was starting (probably a precursor to Wilma). We managed to really mess ourselves up on Mission: SPACE. Heed the warnings on that ride. The warnings at Universal were largely overstated. This one left us feeling like we went through a wringer.
I’m off to Educause 2005 next week. I hope to connect with some other moodlers there. I’ll be wearing my moodle button so say “hi” if you see me! I’ll also be convening the best moodle session there – “Closer to the Dream: Letting Pedagogy Transform Learning Management Systems” — so be sure to attend!