Educause 2011 Reflections
In October, I attended the Educause 2011 Annual Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The conference motto, “The Best Thinking in Higher Education IT”, reflects the non-profit association’s mission to “advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.”
About forty-five hundred people attended the face-to-face conference in Philadelphia from approximately fifty different countries. An estimated two thousand people participated online.
The challenge for me was deciding which presentations to attend of the thirty-four different themes (institutional challenge areas) offering approximately four hundred plus sessions scheduled throughout the two and a half days, and which of the seventy-five pre-conference seminars to attend on the first day! Session themes included: copyright and digital rights management; effective methods for training or instruction; emerging/early technologies; facilitating faculty/research/student success; implications of cloud services; instructional design; integrating technology in teaching and learning; legal/ethical/policy; mobile services; security/privacy/audit, and many others.
For the pre-conference seminar, I attended “How to Develop, Implement, and Assess Mobile Learning at an Undergraduate Institution” presented by David P. Pursell from Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC). Dr. Pursell discussed the GGC iTouch Chemistry Project, a case study of how instructors integrated handheld technology and applications into organic chemistry course lectures and labs. Building on the Thayer method of learning and teaching, Dr. Pursell described how the iTouch project maximizes interaction time among students and the instructor and helps students prepare for their upcoming class, test or exam. This is accomplished by creating short video and audio clips that cover preparatory material for the next class that is viewed by students on their mobile device prior to attending the class. Examples include: viewing an introductory lab video that demonstrates how to use the fire extinguisher and the safety kit before attending the first lab; videos that demonstrate detailed lab techniques that must be viewed by the student prior to attending the lab for that topic; and utilizing digitized flash cards that serve as a review of the previous class and for upcoming tests. An overview of the partnerships required to undertake this case study and the technical details were also discussed. More information about the project is available from http://www.ggc.edu/academics/school-of-science-and-technology/itouch-chemistry-project.
The opening general (keynote) presentation, “Invisible or Remarkable?” by Seth Godin was a conference highlight. Godin touched on a number of topics including “how the world is getting weirder”, the idea that there is more weird than normal and being normal or average supports mediocrity; the importance of not being afraid to fail, “if failure is not an option than neither is success”; striving to be an artist, “what we are doing when we are doing our best work”; “the privilege of becoming a linchpin”, the person in the organization who is indispensable because they are unique and valuable, “the one we can’t live without, the person that changed things”; our obligation to “poke the box”, taking the “initiative to innovate and try something out, look at the hard problems that haven’t been solved yet”; and finally, the importance of “giving gifts, and not favours”, genuinely giving for the purpose of helping without expecting anything in return.
The second general presentation, “Privacy in an Era of Social Media” by Dr. Danah Boyd, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, New York University and Harvard Law School focused on how young people perceive privacy and our responsibility as educators and professionals deploying the technology, to understand its complexity. According to Boyd, “There is a widespread myth that young people don’t care about privacy and embedded in this myth, is an assumption that participating in public social media services indicates a rejection of privacy.” She asserted that “although young people want to participate in public social media sites, they don’t want everything they say to be public, and that they do care about privacy.” Boyd explained that “young people perceive privacy as having the freedom to control their social situation from unintended audiences such as parents, educators and law enforcement agencies and this is where their motivation of privacy arises. Just because content is open and accessible does not mean you are welcome.”
Boyd concluded her presentation by reiterating the importance of understanding the complex privacy issues associated with the use of public social media services such as Facebook and Twitter in higher education and making an appeal:
Part of the challenge is, as you help young people navigate these spaces you can’t just expose them, there is a serious cost about it. Even if they are willing to be public, there is a very different sentiment between their engagement with the public and your exposure of them to the public. As people who are employing technology into the campuses, you get to choose the infrastructure that will help them deal with it. You get to put down the framework for helping them think and bounce off into another environment. They need to learn how to navigate these network publics, and they are struggling to do so, on their own. The more that you understand about the complexities of privacy and publicity, the challenges they are facing and the difficulties of exposure, the more that you can help them navigate the future world that will be highly networked.
More information about the conference, including links to many of the conference materials, is available from the Educause conference website.
Brenda Gerth
