Acronym of the day

Ok, things are looking up. A big advantage of the online attendence is the ease of channel hopping between concurrent sessions.

1. The 2009 Campus Computing Survey, with an valuable commentary from Kenneth Green - headlines were:
   • Budget cuts and competing priorities
   • Continuing reorganisation of IT departments
   • Open Source LMS gaining traction
   • Security issues with cell phones and thumb drives, and...
   • Owners of non-central servers are petulant adolescents(!)
   
2. The Climate Change session seemed to have plenty of science in it, didn't seem very relevant to the conference.
   
3. The third session (Cloud Computing) had technical problems and didn't stream. Is there an irony here?

Ok, acronym of the day: it's come up three times today, so I don't think I can avoid learning it even if I've managed to hide from it until now. ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). The most useful thing this wikipedia page says is: that ERP systems are cross-functional and enterprise-wide. I get that.

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.

Greetings, fellow travellers

Hokay, I have an hour to go before checking in to Educause 09. I've booked a room (meeting room, not hotel room), and checked the laptop will perform. I don't know how much I'll get out of the Online Conference, but getting there is certainly easier.

Now I just need to choose which sessions I'd like to get to, and figure out if I can get to the live events or not. If only I had a 9 hour flight in which to look at all the session descriptions!
Ah well, here goes...

Competition 3 - edublogugagement

OK - so main conference starts today and therefore it must be time to start another competition. This time let's  see how engagement and competitive spirit fit. Work related comments about the sessions/posts will earn points but also we thought it might be fun for you to set us challenges or tasks (conference related of course as we will be in sessions most of the time) to complete whilst we are here. Points are awarded for the challenges/tasks set with extra points if they are fun/useful/interesting, but beware really hard challenges will result in a forfeit for you.

Reminder of the competitions then:
1 - flickr keyword - still running (rated: easy)
2. quiz part 2 - 3 tricky questions and now you set the questions (rated: medium)
3. edublogugagement - as above, engaging with the conference (rated: hard)

Come on, come along and play ;-)

Seminar 03F - Developing an Information Literacy Faculty Institute on Your Campus

I know this is sort of back to front, my earlier digital literacy post was the last 1 1/2 hours of the above pre-conference workshop but seemed to me to stand alone. The rest of the day session was Cornell sharing their model for an Information Literacy Faculty Institute. This was a really good session and I particularly liked the way they did not present a blueprint of "how to run your own" but got us to consider how we might approach different aspects of the institute within the context of our own institutions, so more like "how might this work for you?". They also recreated some of the activities that they do with their faculty as part of the institute and I was impressed by their willingness to devote time in the institute sessions to have an open and frank discuss the concepts, prior experiences and issues, rather than just moving straight to "how to".

I suppose it is only fair to flag that the institute was not entirely about what I thought it was going to be about before going any further (insert appropriate "divided by a common language" reference here). I thought it was going to be a professional development institute for faculty about, and to develop their own, information literacy skills. In fact it was about a professional development institute for faculty focused on curriculum design, specifically about assessment/project design, facilitated by educational developers, learning technologists and librarians that encourages use of authentic learning opportunities and builds undergraduate student research skills. So not what I expected but then not a bad thing either.

The things I really liked about their model:

Seminar 07P - Web 2.0 and the Changing Face of Education: Hands-On "Prosumer" Education in Practice

Sarah Smith-Robbins and AJ Kelton

This session explored the use of Web2.0 technologies such as Delicious, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook etc. I won't go into too much detail here as you've probably heard of most of them but here's a few links to some of the things I'd not heard much about: -

Poll tools

polleverywhere.com

textthemob.com

Video tools

corp.kaltura.com

voicethread.com

Creative tools

www.befunky.com

www.aviary.com

Chat tool

tinychat.com

...and a Web2.0 Application Aggregator

go2web20.net

Grow your own Horizon Report

This session demonstrated the methodology used to develop the Horizon Report. The Horizon Report identifies emerging technologies and trends that will impact education. The method used to compile the report can be adapted for use in strategic planning at institutional level. It is based on the Delphi Method developed in the 60's and uses a range of experts including innovators, opinion leaders and early adopters to reach a consensus about what will and won't be the next big thing based on their expert knowledge. Ideally, the team of experts should have different backgrounds and each bring something different to the table.

The process takes place mainly in a wiki, and while the team of experts are allowed to contribute to the wiki they are not allowed to interact with each other. This is so that each expert is allowed to develop their own opinions without being influenced by strong characters. The first step is for each expert to bring newspaper clippings, reports, press releases etc about new and emerging technologies to the wiki. Together they build a bank of resources of all potential technologies to be included in the report. The wiki look like this: -

http://horizon.wiki.nmc.org/

The next step is to develop the research questions. These can also be seen on the wiki. The experts then attempt to compile a list of technologies to answer each research question. Today, we attempted to address the question:

What are the key emerging technologies you see developing to the point that learning-focussed institutions should begin to take notice during the next three to five years?

Once we had compiled a list (there weren't many of us to our list was made up of 36 items but in reality this would be much longer), a process of elimination began. Each expert is given a number of tokens with which to vote for their favourite technologies (general rule of thumb for number of tokens given at this stage is the square route of the number of items on list). We were given 6 tokens, so we could put between one and six tokens in the items that we felt most strongly about. From this, the top six items, based on all experts votes are taken through to the next stage. Experts are then given half the number of tokens to vote again in the next round, and the top three go into the report. The report is then written based on descriptions, press reports, discussions and any other relevant information.

During the session, we reduced the process which would normally take three to four weeks or longer to just three hours but it was definitely interesting session and I think the approach might be quite useful for our 'Horizon Scanning'.

More detailed information about the session and session resources can be found at: http://www.educause.edu/node/175997