I’m not thinking of suspicious packages. Rather, I’m thinking about the standards and ethics of our profession: folks who support teaching and learning with technology. In that regard, I saw several things at ELI 2014 which made me want to say something, and that something is basically "What goes on…
An academic IT conference in New Orleans begs to be told as a story. But those stories are mostly about good food and good company. (Beignets!) The actual “what I learned at ELI 2014” squeezes nicely into a list––or rather, a table. I personally found five presentations (panels, presentations, poster…
Yesterday, I returned from the 2014 ELI Annual Meeting. For many reasons, I’m highly ambivalent about this conference, starting with the appellation. “Annual meeting” feels like a corporate shareholder meeting, though I’ll allow that they may have been just trying to get away from calling it a conference or symposium…
Are there rules to intuition? One rule emerging from the study of the brain is that the mind needs to allow the “brain voices” space in order to synthesize what was learned. In the 1990’s the LMS was (and can still be) very freeing. It allow students and faculty one…
Crossposted from my own site. Delayed for no particular reason.
A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to be able to attend the 2013 edition of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in at the University of Victoria, in Victoria, British Columbia (w00t! international travel!) and figured I owe the reading public a report.
First of all, this certainly feels like a big event. Once upon a time it wasn’t that many people (the site archive doesn’t list participants until 2004, but we can see that the 2001 edition had 2 courses), but it has grown tremendously over the years, hitting 22 courses and nearly 500 people here in 2013. And that’s not taking into account the three events put on by the institute but not in the summer. Consequently, while I can understand people talking about making lifelong friends at the event, I think these days that’s harder unless you return over multiple years. It was big enough that I didn’t feel bad skipping some of the planned events in order to go out for lunch or just let my brain rest a bit.
Second, I highly encourage anyone considering attending to see whether they can score a seat in Jennifer Guiliano’s course on “Issues in Large Project Planning and Management”. This was what I took, and it may have changed my work life. It would be fair to say that I am a convert to project management thinking and practice, though the former may be more important than the latter. Some of the more important lessons from the course for me:
(Cross-posted and edited from my own site.) On the third and final day of ELI, I managed to get my barbecue-stuffed self to three sessions, only two of which were worth the effort. The first one of the day was S. Craig Watkins from Texas speaking on “Beyond the Digital…
(Cross-posted from my own site.)
My second days in new environments are always radically different from my firsts. I don’t believe I’m alone in this. And in using ‘radically’, I mean very much that they are rooted differently than the first days. The first day is always a little giddy, usually from greater or lesser sleep deficits, and often contains overconsumption of something. The second day is when the tired catches up with me, particularly if the new environment has involved communicating in a second or other language or negotiating a second or other culture.
So it has been also with ELI 2012 in Austin, Texas. Yesterday kept me up for 21 hours and included a barbecue dinner that couldn’t be beat. Today started with a business videoconference and found me settling in to more nearly routine tweeting. Yesterday featured a provocative and energetic keynote as well as a lively panel debate and the chance to meet one of the icons of reflective blogging and learning, of reflective instructional technology. Today’s roster of sessions was much less exciting and much more get-down-to-business. Barbecue was the primary connector thread, it seemed, with another visit and another feast that couldn’t be beat.
What most drew my attention today were two sessions in fairly different veins. The first was a trio of short presentations in a nontraditionally configured session space. As a way of promoting their wares, a prominent furniture provider donated (I will speculate that it was donated, but that may be insufficiently cynical of me) various sorts of chairs and tables to allow setting up a space with both adequate presenter-fronted room and adequate breakout areas. The design was nothing terribly counter-intuitive or unusual, but I would vote for it being the norm rather than a pure presenter-fronted design.
Read more ELI 2012, Day 2
(Cross-posted from my own site.)
It’s been a whirlwind day, and I’ve been more or less up since 3.30a EST this morning, so I won’t guarantee lucidity or accuracy. But that just means that I am being unafraid about getting into the messy business of learning, to paraphrase Gardner Campbell.
Speaking of Gardner, I finally had a chance to see the man live and direct in a panel debate on learning analytics. I should rather say Learning Analytics, since part of what came out of the panel was a proper problematization of the notion of analytics. Whose analytics? What analytics? What is being measured? What is being ignored, hidden, obscured? The other members of the panel were Randall Bass of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, John Campbell of Purdue, and John Fritz of the University of Maryland – Baltimore County.
At times, the fissures between those we could broadbrush as pro-analytics (J. Campbell, Fritz) and anti-analytics (Bass, G. Campbell) loomed large. Campbell (G.) and Bass spoke of long timeframes and patience, Fritz and Campbell (J.) spoke of what we can do now and of timeframes less than 5 years. Bass used a coinage of “slow analytics”, explicitly connecting with the Slow Food movement. Campbell (G.) began with comments about his background with Milton, Bass discussed his 20 years of engagement with educational research and noted his PhD; Campbell (J.) and Fritz didn’t refer to their backgrounds at all and spoke of the need to address issues of scale.
Read more ELI 2012, Day 1