Final keynote - Freeman Hrabowski

Why IT Matters: A President’s Perspective on Technology and Leadership
Freeman A. Hrabowski III - President, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Rather than trying to write this up, I highly, highly recommend that you view it for real (I can't do it justice). There are undoubtly many reasons why Hrabowski has risen to be President of a university, many of which are on display here, but I think ABSOLUTELY that the main reason is demonstrated in how he deals with things going wrong in the middle of the presentation (36mins in)

Watch this!! ...if:

• you'd like to see a "less than typical" head of a university speech - start about 6mins in (or slide28) to get past the general Educause stuff
• you'd like to see what sort of presentation by a senior manager can get several thousand people to their feet for a standing ovation
• you are prepared to get through some very US-specific points to hear other interesting stuff
• you would like a masterclass in "how to deal with a presentation when things don't go your way" (36mins40secs in) - for info PeopleSoft is HR, CRM and student admin tool
• you like sentimental stories or just haven't had a good cry lately (49min30secs in)
• you are interested in how to influence senior managers to see your perspective - he talks IT but I think it transfers (Q&A session about 53 minutes in)
• you're curious how IT helps assholes (1hr,1min,45secs-ish in)
• you want to see how to close a session rather than leaving it just as Q&A fade out (1hr,2min,30secs in)

http://hosted.mediasite.com/hosted5/Viewer/?peid=60706773509a468985f07cd6e23b2609

Don't watch this...if you prefer cynical understatement to enthusiastic overstatement

Twittering and then-some – 7 principles of conference attendance

Instead of the usual best of and worst of... some snapshots to give you a feel for our ordeal.

The conference centre was huge – Educause was at one end of the centre, my hotel at the other, I took the bus which took 10 minutes. The walk to Louise’s hotel, adjacent to the centre took a good 15-20 minutes, by which time the scale of the place made you feel a bit freaky deaky as in “Honey I shrunk the Conventioneers!”

One of the speakers said he realised how different this generation were when his son told him that at his dorm at a US university, he receives an SMS telling him his laundry is dry.

One of the speakers: “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take that picture sir without asking my permission.” Loads of delegates just took a picture of your session or your poster, like that’s really engaging isn’t it (in every sense), next time I am going to say what the speaker said.

“In god we trust, all others bring data” – attributed to the Margaret Spellings US Secretary of State for Education, hence the obsession with assessment.

“Digital Fluency is the new liberal art” – a throwaway, but possibly true

“Our reach exceeds our grasp – IT touches everything” how true, how worrying.

Participants were unusually interruptive this year, there seems a new breed of folk who sit near the front, ask their question as soon as they can, then stomp off to another session, no doubt to repeat this bad behaviour.

And a couple of obscure ones:
I had never heard of Mark Tansey, but one of the speakers put up this picture to illustrate what quality assurance in HE looks like:

Kids on planes bad enough, but beware air transport on Halloween if you are at all coulrophobic

Ordeal? Dinner with three scousers? Two of whom order a steak with crabmeat on top??? Calm down, calm down, we are not paying...

DL is back like it never went away

I went to a session called “Distance Student Learning: The Addition of Rich Media and an Assessment of Outcomes” by Creighton University about an online pharmacy degree. I nearly left early as it turned out to be about videoing lectures. I am glad I stayed as it was one of the most useful sessions I went to.

I wasn’t that interested in the technical solution, something called Echo 360 that enabled lectures to be streamed to DL students 10 minutes after the lecturer had finished... rather, it was a very honest account of the pressures on universities to respond to external pressures and student demand. The university had a group of students on campus, and a DL group doing the same course. The latter were not performing as well as the former. The teachers tried to go back to Chickering and Gamson and work forward, but the students were not interested in e-tivities and other peripherals, they wanted to see and hear what was going on in the classroom that they didn’t and couldn’t attend. It was the age old DL dilemma – wanting to give the students the best experience possible, but not having the resources to do it with, and the students motivations (pharmacy degree=good job, assessment driven) being hard to align with what teachers would really like to do.

We see it at SHU, there is a market, we must get in there, even if it involves the lowest common denominator. Creighton were getting away with it because of the nature of the subject I felt, some of our DL initiatives fail to take into account the opportunity cost of getting involved in something that may need to scale, and moreover that often has retention problems.

Being defensive/ looking backward

In the “The 2008 Campus Computing Survey” session, the speaker came up with three big messages:

• Why don’t Faculty do more with technology?
• Why don’t we make more use of IT on campus operations?
• Why don’t we assess the impact of our investments (IT accounting for 6% of budgets on average)

Overall, for me, there was a bit too much of the “our Faculty are aging” stuff. I don’t think age is a determinant of being innovative in your teaching, there are several examples of this at SHU. I went to several sessions where the above attitude had led to a regression to old fashioned pedagogies – presented as a defence against the current student mindset. The most startling omission at the whole conference was the lack of student input or evidence, apart from the “disconnect” session mentioned elsewhere. Everyone was assessment crazy – remember, assessment in the US is evaluation in our terms – without trying to work out what they were assessing (or why, in many cases).

One of the keynotes was a trip down memory lane, ah the days of punch cards etc what a waste of thousands of people’s time, it drove me mad, so mad I almost started twittering.

The institutional VLE? dead and buried, or due a resurrection?

For about the third year on the run there was a general feeling that VLEs (or LMSs as the Americans refer to them) have had their day. You can almost get caught up in this negative mood, until you start asking whether there is an alternative. I don’t believe that there is, at the moment, as the open source options such as Moodle are hardly out of the box and up and running systems, and they do not offer the level of integration we currently enjoy. Never mind the DF levels of some of our staff.

The most interesting session I went to regarding this was “Disconnects Between Learning Management Systems and Millennial Generation User Expectations” – a panel of 5 universities including Georgia Tech. This session started out with the premise that LMSs were invented to assist Faculty teaching, and as such were about control of activities not about speeding up student learning. The session included videos of students at each of the institutions saying some of the things we have been thinking about for a while:

• Powerpoint is the best thing ever for me, if you can see it before the lecture
• Students don’t like Second Life being used for instruction, or lecturers invading Facebook with messages. They wouldn’t mind an “Academic Facebook” - to link up with students at other institutions, but don’t want to see the two together.
• Students like clickers (but would like to use their phones to do what clickers do) and back channelling if it is structured
• They like “anything” that promotes interaction with teachers and each other
• They want transcripts of what the teacher said so they can check things
• They want to be shown things like LinkedIn as they are important for employability
• Some new millenials cant use email, so have to be contacted by peers via MySpace
• They don’t want FAQs they want knowledge bases
• They like YouTube relevant content, especially as a visual reinforcement of practical competencies
  
• The day before I had gone to an “Industry Roundtable: Openness and Interoperability in Higher Education” with Chasen from Blackboard, a Sakai evangelist, and a couple of real people. One of the real people remarked that the world isn’t a simple as open source=good, vendors=bad. Three of us at the back applauded. Having said that, I don’t really know why Bb are trying to link with Facebook, or Moodle – why they just don’t fix the things that don’t work I will never know.
  

According to “The 2008 Campus Computing Survey”, based on 531 responses, the current priorities are:

• Security alerts and emergency notification (in the wake of Virginia Tech)
• Cuts in budgets
• Open source LMS are gaining traction
• There is only a slow migration to Web 2.0
  

The budget cuts were just about the main topic of an otherwise disappointing session on “Top-Ten “Gotchas” for the New CIO”, which included handy tips about how to maintain your diary (indeed), and highlighted a hiring problem in the US where anyone who is any good goes to the commercial sector. Lots of money was going into plagiarism detection, and e portfolios are taking off, slowly.

90% of institutions have a single LMS (though data is difficult to find re depth of deployment, or % of courses using the LMS). Moodle and Sakai have about 10-15% adoption, and the biggest growth is around Moodle. The speaker rather sarcastically noted that an open source LMS is not like being given a free beer, more like being given a free puppy. Hear hear, said I.

educause highs and lows

I'll add some more stuff about specific sessions over the next couple of days but in the meantime, quick highs and lows round up:

Highs:
- catching up with old and new friends and learning a lot more about what's new and interesting in learning technology....and the ELI ARG
- best session - Gardner Campbell and Jim Groom on UMWBlogs, some bold ideas, new expectations and scary challenges (also some really interesting student email stuff)
- being surprised by Greg Devine's new business - two main things are both things we need and have tried to do before with varying degrees of success
- getting to present at Educause - quite a buzz, though to be honest the poster was more of a high (as my expectations were pretty low and the levels of interest blew me away)
- being in US in the week before the election

Lows:
- the lowest low of all time low stuff was the crappy internet connection - bad in convention centre but absolutely shockingly bad at the hotel, I felt like someone had amputated my typing fingers though the phantoms kept on typing...
- keynotes not up to usual Educause standard - nothing to blow me away (final one was the exception, in many many ways - will post on that seperately)
- never once saw anyone I knew at the Blackboard stand - the new version looks great but the company's new brand-style is stylish and soulless, seemed more remote from client-base and felt more like a software provider than ever before
- staying in hotel next door to convention centre but it still taking 25 minutes to get going each day (yes really, I timed it, from walking into the convention centre door right next to my hotel it took 18 minutes to get to the room where breakfast served even though all on ground floor - it was like an aircraft hanger)

meet or manage?

OK - so perhaps I ought to post about the session I presented (slides available at the link) - Meeting or Managing? Responding to student expectations through policy and practice

I think (?) the session went pretty well though it was quite scary stuff. Approx 250 people at the session and I was tied to the lecturn by microphone cables ("please speak clearly this session is being recorded")... concluded it is harder for me to speak standing still. Also felt slightly odd about the number of people attending the session from what we might call a very, very close geographical proximity. There was a lot packed into the session. I talked some about the survey and its design but mostly about what we did with it. Got into some strange places around Bb consistency (which we have already learned doesn't really travel transatlantic) but overall it was well received - no one left during the presentation which is a good measure at Educause (think I earned extra brownie points by ending the formal bit early for questions so those who wanted to avoid lunch crowds could slip out discretely).

Here is a little extra competition for you....of the 15-20 people who came up at the end what did 14-19 0f them ask for?? - the slides may offer a clue. I have a fabulous apple related prize for the first person to guess (and I have another apple related prize for the first person to guess what the apple related prize is....and it needs to be exactly right)

btw if there are any other sessions that capture your interest here is the link to all the Sessions with Available Resources Speakers are asked to post by 14th Nov so the list may well grow some more.

meetings

here is a post I almost made on Friday before the internet left florida for once and for all...

ooh! internet connection...quick, quick!! OK gonna do a few synthesis posts so that you don't all think we've fallen off the end of the world! ...yeah, I was excited at the time but then it was gone :-(

As always Educause comes with its fair share of meetings as well as sessions, so here is a quick round up:

Greg Devine globalsynergies.com Greg is ex-Bb (this will be a bit of a recurring theme here) some of you may know him as he did the Bb/SI integration back in 2001 and the Presidium scoping in 2006 - he really knows his stuff. Greg's work now is mainly about consulting and he has two things that may be of particular interest to us - he has a Bb building block that provides a usage dashboard (a really nice looking interface that provides ongoing access to the sort of usage analysis data that we get from Bb once a year), secondly he has developed a model that will calculate TCO for open source based on your institutional variables (would be interesting to have real numbers of this - though we can predict the broad expectation). Great meeting, great to see Greg and I was really impressed with the service he was offering.

Chris Etesse kadoo.com Chris is ex-Bb (....) I've been talking about kadoo for a while now, since i saw its early beta version back in Boston July 2007 and it was formally launched at BbWorld this year in Vegas. I remember being slightly disappointed with the formal launch as it seemed to have changed significantly from its original concept (I think the term fully loaded was invented for the kadoo first launch!) so I was glad to see when I met with Chris that they had stripped a lot of the features and UI back to something more managable. Kadoo is a web2.0 online multi-storage site - one place to put images, files, videos that you can then link to and push to various other sites - I guess a bit like a web2.0 content management system so you can have just one version of stuff. It also has a large email client and networks so that you can share your stuff with particular people based upon their relationship with you. I've been interested for a while in its potential for portfolios, so I was really interested when Chris said they were developing a specific ePortfolio feature that will allow users to aggregate a series of assets in one place an present to a viewer (either within kadoo or as an external website). Currently called "stories", which obviously I was less keen on and we talked about alternatives there is real scope in this for students to develop portfolios that are truly theirs and stay with them for life. There is a Bb building block that can enable users to have a kadoo tab within Bb, a portal channel and do some user authentication. It is definitely worth exploring more formally - I think some of you may be involved in a demo call Brian has organised in Nov - if not and you want to come along, speak to Brian. If you just want to take a look (though I'm not sure when the newer version goes live), go to kadoo and sign up - it's free!!

Andrew Rosen http://www.presidiumlearning.com/ Andrew is.... (you know the rest) but then again, Andrew is more importantly current presidium and honorary LTI christmas party attendee!! Andrew and I caught up on developments at presidium specifically about their plans for new waves of training for CSRs on Bb support for staff and some of the new operational procedures for account management. We discussed the September Project that Brian has completed and the associated document was quite the topic of conversation at the client reception too!! Anthony will follow up with Brian. It was good to touch base and just see how things are going, where they are putting their emphasis for new activity and how we can continually improve the service.

David Yaskin starfishsolutions.com David is.... (once more with feeling) This one is much more emergent and still may not travel over the Atlantic (though I hear Teeside and Dundee are looking at it). The early warning stuff is apparently very popular in US though I'm not sure that it travels, the scheduler part of the solution is more interesting to me but would need to be very cheap to be worth having an external service. I think there are some good ideas in the concept and have agreed to discuss further with David once back in UK, though can't see it being a priority (there's a limit to how many priorities we can have at a time.

Other meetings... just to reassure you that I didn't just meet with ex-Bb staff, be assured that there were lots of ex-Bb staff there that I didn't meet with (boom! boom!) - though may have enjoyed a beer with some of them including Dan McFadyen, Steve Gilfus, Greg Davies, Peter van Tiernan, Carl O'Keefe, Joe Mitchell...possibly others I don't recall at this unearthly hour...there were a lot of them around!! I did meet with a couple of Bb people interested in what we are doing with the Bb content system beyond student portfolios, I did my best to lash something coherent together but have recommended they speak to Susannah for the reality!

I also met with Teddy Diggs (editor of Educause Review and fellow twitterer), she is keen to explore us writing something for ER, I also met Nancy Mays at the same time (editor of EQ) also interesting receiving proposals so if anyone interested in this, let's chat when I get back and I can give you the lowdown on what fits best with each publication and how they work the process.

I also caught up with Carie Page (nee Windham) and Julie Little of ELI both of whom had interesting and exciting things to say about ELI's plans for the Annual Meeting and their Teaching and Learning Challenge.

Other people i've got to chat with, sometimes briefly, sometimes more formally each had interesting things to share off-blog - Gardner Campbell, Bryan Alexander, Anand Padmanabhan (CIO NYU Stern), Jon Mott (BYU)

Any questions about any of these...please ask

Before the Deluge

every picture doesnt tell a story... witness

I took this at the start of the poster session, an hour later we had got rid of 100 leaflets and had spoken to loads of people who were really interested (ie really interested, not "really 'interested'") in what we had done with the Executive workshop. This would have made a brilliant pre conference workshop or conference session, but there you go...

looking california/ feeling minnesota

I went to Teaching and Learning in Two New Smart Classrooms: Research Findings on the Pedagogical Implications of Space Design first off. I saw the Crit chap from Georgia Tech who inspired much of the Adsetts extension poke his head in and was just setting off to pay homage when the session started. So I missed him, in fact he may even have been a phantom.

The speakers started off by attempting to transform the room into an innovative learning space, with quite a complicated activity. About 20 Koreans were all in a group up front receiving simultaneous translation and I was about as confused as they were. Overall the session confirmed that we are doing what we need to do with our evaluation of the Adsetts extension - any news about uptake gratefully received btw, but it was however you looked it based on old pedagogy - OK the teacher isnt at the front of the room, but they were still there. Our space is, I feel, an entirely different thing.

Answering the Value Question: Does Technology Impact Student Success

CIOs concerned with perceived value of all IT services
- study to profide evidence, examining the technology for student perspective across 16 community colleges in Maryland
- it investigated student skill levels, usage patterns, preferences for technology, value for students perspective

(eek - there must be 250+ people in the session)

Answering the value question:
This study is heavily based on ECAR study, Chickering and Gamson and drilling role of LMS. There are a lot of common elements in this session to what I'm going to talk about tomorrow. I'm wondering how unusual student use/expectation surveys really are any more. The speakers are making it sound as if they are doing something really different, but I don't think it is - I need to make sure I don't do the same thing tomorrow.

They haven't started talking about the focus of the session yet, they are claiming technology does impact upon student success but the study examines whether students like the features of technology, not correlated through to success. No they haven't looked at student performance impacts, no they aren't looking a representative sample, no they haven't considered anything other than student satisfaction. All the things that I thought the session was going to be about are all the things they would like to do in the future (but no plans as yet)

the human brain

first keynote - true to educause form - was scary the world you live in isn't one you recognise stuff - this time with the emphasis on the human brain and neurology. The speaker was great, really entertaining and clearly very knowledgeable. Not something that is easily captured on a blog but if you ask me f2f I'm sure I can bore you with how to solve pain issues in the phantom limbs of amputees with a $4 mirror, what happens to your skin when you see your mother that doesn't happen when you see a chair, how we can all read the martian alphabet and why people with synesthesia make better artists and poets.

Questions welcome but answers may be...er...limited

skywriting answer

I dont do points, I will leave that to Louise. I thought it was going to be something to do with Obama, but no, it was

yep - "God loves babies". so there you go.

Academic Analytics: Using Institutional Data to Improve Student Success

This was this morning's pre-conference workshop run by John Campbell and Kim Arnold from Pursue. The session was OK in many respects but sadly the basic premise was lost in translation. They did some very impressive statistical modelling to take a whole range of data sets to look for indicators of "at risk", identifying a particular model profile that was 80% successful in prediction "risk". They then applied this model (or a customised version of this model - more on this bit later) to a course weekly, giving students an early warning indicator (traffic lights) and using these to make interventions (email, sms, f2f) pointing them to additional support.

What was good - focus on actionable data, timeliness of interventions, proved (in their context) models were reasonably predictive, focus upon large first year modules.
What was more problematic - customised model for each course (ie module) - each one took approx 16hr per week, every week, in management, analysis and publication so 3 modules would be 1 FTE! (long-winded way of saying not scalable), not sure the very complex stats necessarily identified different students from those who might be identified through a couple of indicators (may be sledge-hammer to crack a nut), traffic lights - worked for them but I though yuck! likely to be very instrumental.

Their indicators were in 3 categories "educational prepareness" (another way of saying entry qualifications), "performance" (phase test results), "effort" (amount on time logged into VLE)
I'm gonna leave the last one for you to ponder cos most of you know my take on that sort of thing...except to say that they found it was the best predictive indicator of success, so my question would be thinking what we think and knowing what we know - how can that be?

Educause simulcasts

Live Simulcasts - Those unable to attend the EDUCAUSE 2008 Annual Conference are invited to watch General, Featured, and Point/Counterpoint Sessions virtually in live simulcasts sponsored by Sonic Foundry, an EDUCAUSE Silver Partner. Watch and ask questions at the Featured and Point/Counterpoint sessions.

I am just starting to understand this other game, but here's one for you....



I was trying to write an ADC paper this afternoon, and given that I can hear the groans from here at the words "I was trying to write an ADC paper this afternoon", I was gazing out of the window of the hotel room, looking for inspiration, and saw this very complicated skywriting thing going on...












"Kin y'giss worritis yet sport?" as Rolf would say.

Competition 2!!

As promised I'm gonna "borrow" the mLearn picture competition, with a little twist (at least to start with), you can choose pictures that represent blog post labels - 1pt per label represented picture, bonus points for good/funny explanations of images chosen, 3pts for images that represent pre-used portmateaus (so far you can have twitterii, advertorial, sheducause, emerologies, digent, twitzophrenic...) Come on, you know you want to!

btw in exciting development today, prizes may not be mackerel based afterall, I've manage to find something way koala (see what I did there?)

Arrived safely...

...and thinking there might be some kind of electoral process underway here at the moment - there has been the odd passing reference to it on the news - yes, I'm loving it.

Typical travel shenanigans and the sun is shining in the sunshine state. Conference starts tomorrow with pre-conference workshops, so the blog may be pretty quiet today as I get stuck in to usual Sheffield Hallam work stuff. Though I guess it is only polite to get one of the games kicked off.

Shumanteau II (the revenge of wordjam)
Guess the meaning of the following (very easy) warm ups

twitteratii
advertorial
sheducause

3 points for the correct answer, 2 point for any funny Educause/conference/SHU-related suggested translations, 1 point for a funny non-related suggestion.

Also there is 1 point available for any newly-made Educause/conference/SHU-related portmanteau.

Please note this is a public blog - so keep them nice ;-)

Getting started

OK, well here is the customary intro post - setting off early in the morning and glad I've remembered that the clocks go back tonight!! There will, of course, be postings of what's going on, interesting discoveries, challenging new session formats and, well yes, there may also be a little smackerel of blog-game-playing.