Been a bit tardy writing up my thoughts as have been so busy – takes a long time to walk from one session to another 😉
So good things/good thoughts
1. Social media session was great, so good ideas and felt inspired
2. Love organisation at Educause – loads of power sockets, fab wireless, efficient registration. V well organised
3. Poster session went well. Could never do sales but did have some good conversations with people about our poster and encouraged to write it up
4. Interesting session on evaluating learning environments, should give us some thoughts for evaluating classroom pods
5. Fun! Size of Educause and enthusiasm is inspiring, and has given me some head space. Also some funny sessions – eg “is the internet making us stupid” one. After my lack of understanding of keynote today, probably!
6. Lovely hot weather -aaah bliss.
And some less good things…
1. Opening keynote was a bit shouty and focused on education as a business which I have some problems with. Yes we need to change but are Universities really analogous to Google and Amazon? Thought that weakened his change arguments and the points about outsourcing all course creation didn’t inspire me to think unthinkable but made me wonder whether I misunderstood purpose of HE! Surely comparing HE to business means that HE will always fail. Yes we need new models, but we should be thinking creatively about our core purpose and not change into “degree factories”. This will mean end of Universities and to survive I believe we need to have high ideals and aspire to be different
2. Conference focus. Seems a lot more CIO and IT infrastructure focused this year. There are some good sessions on L&T but leadership sessions seem v IT focused and the leadership strand seems weaker this year. A few people have commented on this and I think that is a shame. I hope the balance is redressed next year
3. Not so many good freebies at Exhibition 😉 – but have put in for a number of competitions!
4. Fearsome aircon in conference halls, brrrr
5. Anaheim – fine if you are visiting Disney and have a car, then you won’t have to spend all your time walking next to 6 lane highways. Prefer City locations so looking forward to Philly next year 🙂