Lukewarm

Okay, I've just been to my first session. The online conf had a seperate keynote: Collaboration Is Strategy, Brad Wheeler, (Vice Pres. for IT, CIO, Indiana U)

Took me a while to get value fom Brad, as his initial premise was that the reason for collaboration is to leverage financial benefits in this economic downturn. Once he mentioned that collaboration might also contribute to the 'common good' I tuned back in. He saw the goal the construction of a 'meta-university'; I see it as meeting the challenges of planetary environmental sustainability.

However here are some notes:

• Competition = differentiation;
• Colloaboration = becoming similar.
• Collaborators need to align their goals, values, timescales, governance, problem solving methodologies.
• Expect consortium IT sourcing as an economic necessity.
• Plus a new Open Content site to explore later: cnx.org - "to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks".

This is not exactly a good advert, but one participant said: "All sessions should display a video feed of the speakers as well as the slides. Slides and audio are not enough to engage the audience" - i.e. it wasn't just me who found the presentation really long! There will be video for most sessions, so it can only get better from here. Phew.