At the end of October I had the great experience of attending the annual EDUCAUSE conference in Orlando, Florida. EDUCAUSE is one of largest information technology conferences in Higher Education, billed as “the premiere IT event in higher ed.” I was fortunate to find my way to some great sessions run by people I’ve been reading about for years, build some professional contacts, and even follow the conference back-channel discussion on an amazingly active Twitter feed.
For your convenience, I’ll distill my 26 pages of notes down to some of the key topics and themes that stood out to me:
Virtual Worlds
The most talked about technologies at EDUCAUSE were Virtual Worlds, with Second Life being the most popular. I heard from speakers from Case Western, CU Boulder, UW Madison, and Montclair State about their endeavors in Second Life for a range of uses, including distance learning meetings spaces, training activities, and cultural explorations. Though virtual worlds are certainly an exciting area of exploration in higher ed, many folks feel these tools are still in their infancy and have a ways to go before we’ll see wide-scale adoption.
Student Made Videos / Digital Stories
Having student create videos, and the implications and best practices for doing so was another hot topic. We’ve talked about Digital Storytelling several times before on TeachOIT and many instructors and instructional designers I spoke with at EDUCAUSE see these types of projects as an important educational activity where the technical tools have reached maturity. Representatives from UPenn, Dartmouth, and Temple University discussed the importance of these projects for building media literacy and their success in using them across the curriculum. Duke University, who grabbed headlines for giving every freshman an iPod in 2004, has been experimenting with wide-scale loaning of Flip Video cameras for use in student projects. Even the keynote speaker for EDUCAUSE, Freeman Hrabowski III, President of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, touched on Digital Storytelling as part of his overarching talk on “Why IT Matters.” He sees the digital storytelling projects they’ve been doing at UMBC as one of the core areas where IT is being used to connect faculty across disciplines, as well as students with people in the nearby community.
Evolving Student Expectations
Changes in students’ attitudes and expectations has frequent intersections with technology topics and is something I hope we’ll explore more in the future on TeachOIT. Whether calling them digital natives, millennials, the Net-Generation, or Generation YouTube, discussions about how Higher Ed and IT will meet the expectations of incoming students was a theme throughout a swath of the sessions I attended. I heard from speakers from Georgia Tech, University of Baltimore, and New Jersey Institute of Technology who all conducted focus group discussion with students and their expectations for technology. They discussed how learning management systems like SPARK and WebCT “are primarily built around teaching, but not necessarily learning.” Their focus groups highlighted that students will gravitate toward any tools that are used well, and that convenience, opportunities for community, and ease of access are all critical to student adoption of any tool.
Conclusion
In addition to these major themes, I also heard some great talks on the role of IT in Higher Ed administration, changing expectations about Copyright and Fair Use, student media habits with peer to peer tools, and some great keynote presentations with musings on how technology is changing society in general. My first EDUCAUSE was a valuable experience and I hope to attend again. Please seek me out or leave comments below if you are interested in discussing any of these topics further.