happyharriet's blog

Rice University has undertaken an initiative to start using the things that their students are already using.  Students indicated that they don't use email (email is for old people).  They use their social networking tools.  Watch this video.

Comments from the audience:

Presented by Rebecca Gould, Director of Information Technology Assistance Center, Kansas State University.  She started out by showing us a pictorial of the extreme makeover of a classroom.  A large screen (almost movie size) installed on wall, use of clickers, lecture hall style seating, The goals of the project were empowerment and ownership.

They started by looking at the total inventory of classrooms, developing a team to come up with strategic ways to acquire technology (S.W.A.T.), common core (courses with the greatest need), budget estimates, etc. Some of the issues were capacity, ADA compliance, acquiring appropriate approvals, security, maintenance, etc.  Need 2.4 million dollars for some of their classroom makeovers.

Presentation given by FR Nordengren, Des Moine University.  He is an education technology strategist and works in the college of health sciences.  His job: Assess student engagement with technology, find out how we can maximize the current tools we use.  Create a formal faculty mentoring program. 

23 Things - Helene Blowers (Librarian) She set up a way for staff to study 23 contemporary tools on the web, they were incentivised and challenged to learn about these tools.

He decided that he needed the FedEx arrow (look between the e and the x) - if you have no budget and you need a person to think about your product, tell them that whenver they see the fedex arrow to think about the product. 

So borrowing from these two sources, he came up with 12 resonable tools to represent what Web 2.0 is all about - that the faculty could review, research, study in 10 months.  Things such as RSS feeds, google documents, blogger page, flakes, google alerts, tagging information, podcasting, facebook, wikipedia, flickr, ect.

This presentation was given by Chris Scheetz, Jim S.C. Tom, and Kenneth L. Voss all from University of MIssouri - St. Louis.  They created the first flexible technology enhanced classroom (learning studio).  They describe it as provocative and experimental. They wanted to do this project to increase enrollment and maintain retention. 

They conducted a systematic upgrade of classrooms on campus.  They did a survey of how faculty members taught their classes.  Most of them used the lecture based methods.  Most of the classrooms were very immobile.  Computers locked down, tables/desks and seats immobile.   They included  faculty, staff and students, facilities & planning in the design of this classroom.  It started with a working paper for planning this classroom. He emphasized the fact that it was not just an IT project.  It required everyone's participation campus/department wide.  4 million dollar project.

James Varn, Director of Faculty Development, Mississippi Valley State Univ., gave this presentation.  Not quite sure there are still people out there who are not familiar with Google docs anymore.  However, there are probably some people who may need to know what you can do with google documents. He suggests that chat within Gmail works really well.  He gave an overview of Gmail and google docs.  The advantage of google docs is that everyone can contribute, you can track the document revisions in real time.  You can control who has access to the document.  You can conduct peer reviews, work on group projects, review history of revisions, will convert to word or pdf formats, use it for brainstorming or project papers for comments.  Google docs allows you to insert comments, compare revisions to determine work each student has contributed.  Google docs also has spreadsheets and presentations.  Google groups is nothing more than a discussion group.  You can create a discussion topics, add people to the discussion, etc.  Goggle talk is just a basic instant messaging app.

This presentation basically covers the use of clickers for assessment.  The presentation was made by Morrie Schulman - University of Texas Austin.  I had expected the presentation to cover a more diverse set of technologies.  However, he claims that many studies show that the ROI with distance students is exceptional.  Students report that they feel more engaged in the class because of the use of clickers.  He says at UT Austin they are using the clikers in courses such as; Physics, Biology, Busines Statistics Sociaologyu, Nursing, Pharmacy ... mostly for discussion questions and group work.  The questions are basically knowledge questions.  The students use the clickers to submit their answers.

He briefly mentions PDAs, WiFi enabled laptop PCs, Tablet PCsSlate (pen based wireless divice., etc.  He says that all of these devices work with software that encourages student interaction?!   He also talks about DYNO, Classroom presenter, Ubiquitous presenter, and  WriteOn (Virginia Tech) as programs that work with such wireless devices.

Chief Knowledge Officer for Nasa Space Center in Houston - she talks about the advantages of sharing information across platforms, departments, etc.  She briefly debunked common myths. Synopsis: In order to have successful knowledge sharing it starts with the leadership of your organization.  Knowledge sharing must be encouraged because invariably you will run into an employee who will want to "hoard" their knowledge and not share it.  Leadership must create buy-in for knowledge sharing.

Remember that this is a paradigm shift, therefore change managment takes time.  You should realize that it will take a long time in order to make it happen.  Keep in mind that younger workers you are mentoring must be taken into account.  Are you connecting and engaging those workers? (retention)  Studies show they want to be wired, empowered, mentored, utilize social media, they are easily bored, etc.

She shared different ideas to start knowledge sharing.  Interesting presentation.  www.nasa.gov 

Hello Edublogger's

This is the first post to my Educause blog.  Looking forward to blogging everyday of the conference!

~ Happyharriet