EDUCAUSE 2008 Annual Conference ... continued

EDUCAUSE. How to summarize the events of Wed-Fri? It’s not an easy task to condense three days of sessions, discussions, and additional vendor conversations into something short enough to be read, but helpful enough to be worthwhile. I’ll hit some of the highlights here and you can certainly chat with me next week (or whenever) for more information. By the way, for those interested, EDUCAUSE 2009 will be held Nov 3-6 in Denver, Colorado.

General Sessions: The most interesting of the three general sessions was the one held this morning on “Why IT Matters” (…to college presidents). Hrabowski said that the language we use and how we interact with others defines who we are as individuals and as an organization. Technology is a language. We need to bring our classrooms to life using technology. He also said that IT is the main catalyst for change on campus and that we need to ask the question, “What difference can be made with technology?” That question needs to be asked of the campus community, the data gathered and analyzed, and then shared back to the community so that it can be acted upon.

Discussions: Wednesday noon I joined a discussion group for Instructional Technologists. The topics shared will be on the Educause website. At our table, there was discussion of learning management software systems. One school is 7 months into a Blackboard to Moodle conversion and having good success. They are also beginning to implement Google Apps for Education and are interested in the integration of the two. (FYI – This individual knows Bob P as probably does every other school who is implementing Moodle) Another topic was how best to provide training and support to faculty and staff regarding other software programs.

Thursday noon I attended a User Services discussion group. Service level agreements (SLAs) were the first topic of conversation and probably the most lengthy since it includes policy decisions as well. The advice from those with success was to keep them general in nature as opposed to operational. There was also discussion of service catalogs – documentation of what services the IT department will provide to the community and example sites were shared. Some of the other topics included patching, asset management, backups, communication of outages / info, security.

Other: I’ll list a few of the other sessions I attended to show the broad range of topics. Feel free to ask for more information about any of these that are of particular interest to you: Crafting a Campus Identity (using Facebook / MySpace), Emerging Learning Spaces, Mobile Learning with iPhones, iTunes U and the Duke Experience, User Services “Lightening Round”, Future of Instructional Computing Labs, Teacher Autonomy in Online Course Design, Effective IT Communications Program.