Educause 2019: Session Lessons

First of all, Educause was in Chicago, which was pretty great- except that, with some more forethought, I could have seen more than this:

Instead, I learned a lot, networked even more, and encountered some new ideas:

1. In the pre-conference workshop focusing on active learning spaces, one of my key takeaways was the analysis what kind of teaching is happening when and for how long - and how attendance is only an issue in some of these types of teaching.  This discussion, coming out of Australia, discussed the mapping of pedagogical constructs (prepare, connect, discover, activate, demonstrate, consolidate, extend) on to learning modalities (didactic, participative, facilitative, self-directed, supportive) over the course of the term. 

The mapping broke down as follows, with the percentage being the amount of time throughout a term this may last:

Didactic - prepare through activate - 15%

Participative - connect through demonstrate - 20%

Facilitative connect through consolidate - 25%

Self directed - discover through extend - 30%

Supportive - demonstrate - through extend - 10%

The percentages created the aha moment and showed that the first two created the attendance issues - if students missed these, faculty were concerned, so focusing on these two parts as the times and spaces active learning strategies needed to be implemented to engage students, making it more likely for them to come to class made it easier for faculty to consider active learning (vs. the idea that the entire course needs to be redone).

Another key take-away were the square footage numbers that McGill is aiming for and what it has as a standard in its various classroom types:

ALC 22sf

Flat floor 19.66sf

Flat floor large 16.20sf

Lecture hall 15.86sf

Auditorium 12.72sf

Standard  25 sf 

2. Steven Johnson's keynote focused on reframing the narrative of innovation away from a lonely genius inventor to the sense that innovation comes out of collaboration, in particular diverse collaboration. The terms he used were slow hunch - something that grows slowly over a long period of time, together with liquid networks - the people and networks that, in their diversity, change over time and bring different perspectives to the slow hunch.
The 18th century coffee house was his prime example of how this kind of liquid network has worked in the past.  For more on his ideas, check out this TedTalk: https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from?language=en

3. The Better Allies session was also quite meaningful, especially seeing quite a few of my Auburn colleagues in the room, which was heartening.  Catlin focused on office housework, use of language, and how we need to protect our colleagues so that they are able to focus on productive work, not busy work.  Definitely a book to read!

4. Tom Tobin's session on Universal Design for Learning brought home two points for me:  We need to make sure that universal design for learning is not something that is seen by faculty as one more thing to do - rather, we need to encourage and teach everyone on campus what this is, why it is important, and how they can use it.  And we need to make sure not to overwhelm everyone.  Instead of insisting that multiple formats need to be used for folks to access content in multiple ways, let's focus on one more way.  If I send something out as a text document, to make sure that it can be listened to. If I send out a video, to make sure that it has captions.  Tobin also managed to capture the pre-conference attention by giving us a busy, nonsensical slide - quite a lot of fun!

Other fun things during the conference:  Betsy Gilbertson, Shawndra Bowers and I presented our Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Information Technology poster, and we had lots of great discussions:

And we could write notes to young female coders to encourage their continued work:

Educause 2019 - Technology Finds

This year's Educause seemed to move even faster than previous ones - the venue was huge, many of the sessions very engaging, and with over 8,000 attendees, this was the largest gathering to date.

With this post, I want to highlight some of the technologies in the exhibit hall that caught my eye, even if only for a brief moment.  I am not endorsing them; I am simply pointing out that they had some features that struck me as useful.

1 Beyond:  https://1beyond.com/automate is a set of cameras that allow for a wide scope shot with one camera while tracking the speaker with a second camera.  Facial recognition software allows for intelligent tracking.

GlyphEd for data visualization: https://www.glyphed.com/ This looked rather strange, and maybe that was the appealing part of it, but its visualization made it easy for someone like me to spot the anomaly,  Of course, it may have also just been a very clear example for the sales pitch.

Steelcase may have done it again, creating a new collection, Flex collection - the wheel barrow approach strikes me as quite useful for maker spaces that need to be more flexible, and I was quite taken by their mobile whiteboard solution.


Techready.io: https://techready.io/ - a potential solution for ensuring that devices used by online students are ready for online courses, online exams, and online participation.  This may be too intrusive, but could help with better information when students need technical help and don't know enough about the devices they are using. 

Pronto - different messaging platform in Canvas: https://trypronto.com/ - not sure that it is a real improvement, but it was touted as working better on mobile devices.

Acadly - for attendance and student response systems - https://www.acadly.com/ - this system could make it easier and more reliable to take attendance in any size class.  The system also makes it easier to track attendance of individual students, identifying students at risk, and it incorporates some polling, quizzes, Q&A and other features for student engagement.

Nearpod - student response system on steroids - nearpod.com - I watched a bit more of a demo for this one, and it has some intriguing features:  a large library of 360 degree, high resolution photos of, for example, a hospital room, that students can explore on their own devices, 3D models that an be rotated and zoomed into; universal design for learning features making it easy to have text or audio available to students, and some other interesting student engagement features.  As the instructor, you can also choose if you want to run the presentation synchronously or have it set for student-paced, which makes this easier to use for a complete online course.