Travel Reports

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).

On Oct. 16-17, 2008, I attended the ILA annual conference at the Grand River Center in Dubuque.

I recently attended a conference called InfoComm 08 during the week of June 18th. The conference is geared towards A/V and Classroom Technologies. Over 350 courses are offered during the show that range from audio, video, projection systems, room design, AV-IT, to digital signage. I attended the Extron Institute School of A/V Technologies for Higher Education at which I was exposed to all new Extron products and a short course on AV and IT merging technologies.

ResNet continues.

This was one of those days where you're grateful there will be online videos of the sessions. One time slot had three or four different sessions that I wanted to attend, but alas, I could only be in one place at a time. Note to Self - Next Lucky Charms, request higher priority for cloning machine.

ResNet '08 has begun.

The trip here was enjoyable, but thankfully, we were limited to only three flights. Each time we switched planes, they got smaller. I was afraid another stop would have us sticking our arms out the windows and flapping the rest of the way. Fredericton is a beautiful town and the University of New Brunswick boasts that it was one of the first universities in North America.

On June 2nd-4th, I attended a NITLE event for Instructional Technologists. The conference gave me a chance to interact with peers from 37 liberal arts colleges. Our first task was to try to define the professional identity of instructional technologists. These engaging discussions gave me a better sense of the priorities and organizational structures that drive academic technology at other institutions.

Monday and Tuesday I attended the spring Task Force meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) along with Marcia from LIS. The meeting is day and a half of reports highlighting current projects and innovations in networked information (for libraries and information technology). Being in Minneapolis, it’s also relatively close which is nice to save another airline trip (especially this week).

This post is a retread slightly for the LIS Blog. Last winter (or more correctly perhaps still this winter), Bob Puffer attended the ELI conference (Educause Learning Initiative) in San Antonio where he heard a number of folks I also caught on my recent multi-conference tour. Among them was Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology from Kansas State University. He is perhaps most well-known for his YouTube creation Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us" which has pegged over 5,000,000 views to date.

This past Thursday through Saturday, I attended the NITLE Summit in San Francisco. The Summit brought together representatives from nearly every NITLE school (new and old) and included a wide variety of attendees including presidents, deans, faculty, librarians, technologists, and those who find themselves in several of these roles. The last time NITLE gathered for a similar summit was four years ago near Chicago. Content was a mix of plenary sessions, breakout sessions, and a poster session with more than 50 presentations from NITLE schools.

Report from the Datatel Users Group conference held March 8-12, 2008 in Washington, D.C.

I attended a number of sessions that provided valuable information that we can put to use in the next year.

* Performance tuning – I attended several tuning sessions covering Datatel Colleague Release 18 (R18), Web Advisor, DMI listeners (used in R18) and web load performance testing. I gathered lots of information that should help us understand more about the database administration functions that need to occur on the Datatel and Web Advisor servers to help improve performance.