I’m back from attending my first EDUCAUSE conference in sunny Orlando. It was a great experience and an interesting conference, although I’m not sure someone like me fits neatly into the 4 tracks (Leadership, IT, Libraries, Teaching and Learning). I don’t think I had a big “aha!” moment either, but did come away with a bunch of ideas, some renewed connections and some stuff to find out more about, which is what you hope to get out of any conference, right? Some session recordings, including an amazing lecture by V.S. Ramachandran about the human brain, are available here.
Ideas and cool stuff
I saw a neat demo by MIT on their mobile applications for PDAs; apparently, all the code is available for sharing.
Some other noteworthy sessions I attended were:
Engaging the YouTube Generation
This session featured presenters from different institutions who provided some interesting ideas about video projects and contests. UPenn has a yearly “mashup” contest for videos of different lengths (e.g. 1 minute, 3 minutes) which began 2 years ago. They have a digital media lab available and support in the learning commons, which they feel is key to the success and growth of the project, and have also created resources to help faculty assess video projects. Dartmouth’s Jones Media Center also has resources to help faculty think about why they might want to create video assignments, how they might assess them and examples of past project assignments.
Learning Space Design
Univ. of Minnesota used design thinking to create some cool learning spaces. Neat features were plasma screens and table microphones students can use when presenting their group work to each other in the classroom. The prof. can then “push” what the students have displayed to everyone’s screens. Research questions that have been investigated using this model classroom include faculty and student attitudes and expectations. See http://www.classroom.umn.edu
Crit Stuart from Georgia Tech talked about using an ARL Tool Kit on designing learning spaces. The toolkit contains were a bunch of great strategies for gathering feedback and generating ideas wen designing learning spaces.
Course designed like a video game
The take away from this session was that we need to be intentional about introducing gaming elements into our course design. Suggestions include:
- bonus points, points not percentage
- letting students work steadily or in bursts (think of this as “digital time”)
- allowing students to select several different paths to get through the course
- using a variety of assessments, some of them like games (e.g. a “scorecard”: give students a scorecard to rate different web sites)
- using multimedia: makes use of public video and other multimedia; tries to use existing material as possible so that she can focus on other aspects of the course; TED Conference as a source for video?
- timely feedback
- peer “pressure”/peer feedback and assessment; student work accessible to all in open repositories; also puts in place collaborative/peer learning; students can take on the role of novice, expert and coach (I’m not how this would work work if students are not at the same place in the curriculum and if learning is scaffolded
Stuff to find out more about
- The ALA Techsource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium, happening right now if Chicago (wish I’d heard about that one a little sooner, but it’s definitely something to watch for next year)
- EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative has a ton of resources I need to spend some time looking at; sounds like their conference would be a good idea, too. They are currently compiling a list of Top T&L Challenges for 2009, and 21st century literacies/fluencies is on it
- IBM data visualization tool: Many Eyes (freely avail. from their site?)
- digital storytelling
Tags: educause2008
