That pretty sums up EDUCAUSE ‘08. And I must say it was off the chizzle! (ie. excellent, well-organized, profoundly stellar, etc.). V.S. Ramachandran kicked it off with a great keynote on how the mind functions and the complexities of mapping the human brain. As intriguing as it was, my feebled self had significant troubles tying neuro-psychiatric syndromes and the loss of ones limbs to the future and sustainability of educational technology. I’m sure one of the uber-deep and intensely metaphoric attendees was able to draw parallels… but not me, I just giggled my self to pieces when V.S. told the 9,000+ crowd that humans engaged in “latent bestiality and incest”. Once I heard that, V.S. instantly won my vote for best keynote ever.
Thursday mornings session was also intriguing. Sarah Robbins (aka Intellagirl), you know, the cool Second Life chick with the pink bangs, threw down during her presentation on Social Media and Education: The conflict between technology, institutions and the future. If colleges and universities don’t “man up” and start embracing the power of social media, they will find themselves irrelevant to students expectations. Harvard’s competition will no longer Yale, but its bastardized child, Facebook.
Let’s see, what else happened… I made it to most of the sessions in my schedule except for the one on Google Apps @ USC. OMG, it was packed! Like, I mean little-grey-haired-women-were-climbing-on-trash-cans-just-to-catch-a-glimpse-of-the-PowerPoint packed. Like seriously, they wouldn’t even let the apunctual physically-challenged folks on scooters get a sneak peek! From what I could hear, USC was just talking about the importance of cloud computing and how they didn’t force their students to adopt Google Apps (Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar, etc.), but yet and still its heavily adopted and everyone loves Google cause USC is saving money, yadda, yadda. But on the real, cloud computing is where it’s at. As is Google.
Speaking of Google, when I saw their booth in the exhibition hall… my heart started to flutter and my countenance became giddy. I wanted so badly to take the young Google girls by their hands and skip with them exclaiming “I love your compannnyyyy, your company is big brotherrr, but I luvvvsss ittt sooo muchhh. Yayyy!” Wish I was joking. 
A few other booths I thoroughly checked out were:
Blackboard - Oh man, version 9/NG, its about to make me a believer - very very promising! And with its newly announced Moodle integration, Sakai integration and RSS feed aggregation… I’ll clearly be copping some of that good BBBB stock at $26/share (52-week low, w00t!)
Microsoft - The new tablet PC table that looks like a classic Pac-Man tabletop is off the chizzle, too! They demo’d it with your typical political map (Blue VS Red) and was zooming into different states, similarly to what they do on CNN. Still, I was thoroughly impressed. It’d be nice if my institution could cop one (nudge, nudge) and integrate it with our Voting America/Digital Scholarship Lab app for students who will be camping out in the library on election day.
Turning Point - They were trying to hock some cheap looking clicker remotes, that honestly, were pretty slick. Real time polling w/ powerpoint. The applicability in class on politics could be very high, especially when trying to elicit authentic responses from emotionally-charged questions.
Smartboard - Another “off the chizzle” tech company. These folks are just make huge moves. Digital whiteboards are where its at - especially when Google Earth is on them. Who wants to spin the globe now?
Apple - Iphone, one day, will own me - again. I kind of wish I never sold my old one. One of the most fascinating ed apps, in my opinion, was the mobile portal that MIT created for mobile devices (cough, iphone, cough). Students can go to m.mit.edu and track, in real time, the location of campus buses, see geo-maps of buildings and classrooms… all kindsa good stuff! I’ve seen the GPS bus thingamajig at NC State on a few flat panels in their library - but having this capability on your mobile phone? Wow and wee!
Here a few videos I took walking around, I’ll post more soon
VENDOR NO SPM PLZ from Kenneth Warren on Vimeo.
Recent Comments