Educause Day 2

My second day at last week's Educause was a busy running around from one session to the next, with my poster presentation in the middle of the day, some new cool ideas from the exhibit hall, and some very interesting ideas from other institutions.

Lots of big infographics with various types of information on them are sprinkled throughout the conference:

Faculty and early Warning

Numbers on Engagement

The day started off with a key note by Clayton Christensen, Professor at the Harvard School of Business and one of the thinkers about disruptive innovations.

Now, if you have been at Educause before, you have heard talks about disruptive innovation before, but he did give it a different spin with some memorable pointers such as -- disruptive innovations come from the bottom, so don't look at the Tessla car but at the GEMcars and golf carts as innovation drivers.  It is not a question about being better than the competition but about being better than nothing.
Modular architecture allows for innovation, while proprietary architecture allows for profit - the mix of both is driving a lot of successful innovations.
Outsourcing often sets disruptive in motion disruptive business model liquidation - his example is how Acer chipped away at Dell's personal computer business until only the brand was left -- and at that point, Acer could create its own brand and be profitable.
His example of distance education was interesting -- a colleague had to teach a class distance because of special circumstances.  he used a button device for his students -- button 1 when pressed indicated to him that this student wanted to contribute to the threat of discussion, button 2 indicated to him when a student wanted to start a new discussion threat, and button 3 indicated that someone wanted to move on.  While the class was synchronous, they were in a very different place, and this tool allowed for the instructor to gauge the direction of the discussion.  In addition, he used one of the little robots on wheels with an ipad attached to it so that he could facetime into class and be mobile on the robot.

The session Mobility without Security gives you a failing Grade, presented by The Ohio State university and the University of North Carolina, and sponsored by Dell, discussed the well-known dilemma of wanting to make work easy and convenient to folks without sacrificing security -- and the trouble to find a happy medium.  While their final solution was a Dell product, they did discuss some Mobile Device Management issues and reminded us that daily uploads to Dropbox are in the millions -- and there is really nothing we can do about this.

The discussion round on Games and Learning was quite interesting and introduced to me a number of techniques and tools.
1.  To manage discussion in a room with a few vocal folks, or silent folks:  Give them each two two-colored chips.  If they want to to contribute to the ongoing discussion they hold up one color, of they want to start something new, they hold up the other color.  Once they contribute, they turn in one chip; no more chips, no more turns, giving the more quiet folks in class to chime in.,  This could be turned into a game of who all can get rid off all the chips by the end of class.
Just Press Play, developed at Rochester:  https://play.rit.edu/ is an online tool that allows folks to work through a library quest or other student-life related processes in a game-like fashion.
One person talked about using the game Pandemic:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic_(board_game) for Pharmacy courses.
A couple of folks discussed Aris Games, an open source platform, for developing online games:  http://arisgames.org/ with others mentioning http://www.blender.org/.
Someone has developed an online game about surviving an online course, with zombies as apparently everything works better with zombies these days (or with bacon).
One interesting observation about games and rules.  Many of us grew up with the sense that we follow the rules of the game in order to get the most out of the game -- but we see kids deliberately break the rules of online games, getting out of the frames - how does that affect gaming?  The most famous pop-incident may be in the second Hunger Games novel when Katniss shoots the sky and breaks the dome, the frame of the game.

And of course then there was my poster session:  https://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/2014/things-you-may-not-think-when-designing-21st-century-classroom