Serendipity35

I expected to be blogging live at the EduComm conference in California a few weeks back, but that didn't happen. Maybe that was a good thing. I was too busy listening, or too busy enjoying myself in & around Anaheim.

EduComm occurs at the same time & is connected with InfoComm which is the biggest of the A/V shows and was across the street. You could go between the two (unlike at Disney where my california Adventure ticket couldn't get me into Disneyland) and there were vendors farther than the eye could see.

I'm not big on vendor shows. Purchasing is not my area, other than making recommendations. And I'm not really that interested in the bigger/better/newer models of things I use - especially if I know there's no chance the school can purchase it. And I have all the bags, mugs, pens and stress balls I can ever use.

I generally avoid sessions that sound pedagogical but are done by vendor reps because you know it will be more of a sales pitch than anything else. I understand that. I don't expect the Apple rep doing the podcasting workshop to talk about using Audacity to do audio podcasts on Windows machines, but I prefer teachers & technologists who are doing something in classrooms.

I did attend all the keynotes. I'll probably write a post for each of them at some point, but here's the fast take.

The first one was Alan Kay from MIT who just flies through applications of technology and was talking about big things in K-12 schools and using a working version of the much talked about $100 laptop.

David Pogue from The New York Times is someone I've seen several times. He's usually funny and full of new gadgets and trends. He sometimes gets flack for being very much in love with Apple (he wrote a bunch of Mac books) and I thought that he would be fawning over the then soon to be released iPhone. He was one of the 4 tech writers that got one to play with and I assume that Apple was pretty sure it would get a good review. Actually, he didn't spend that much time on it. In fact, he was bigger on the Skype/T-Mobile VOiP phone deal that was to be released the same day as the iPhone.

Wesley Fryer was the main K-12 world rep. His blog, speedofcreativity.org, is on my Bloglines list. I'm guessing that the conf planners wanted him to do a Web 2.0 talk. That was a kind of theme/thread at the conference. Is it just me or does Web 2.0 already seem old? I knew of most of what he was talking about, but my guess is that most K-12 teachers and a good chunk of his audience (techie as they might be) are still new to 2.0 apps. It's a hard topic to present on these days. It's like teaching that big freshman course in math or English where you have a wide range of students. Some already know this stuff and are going to be a bit bored, but you have to cover it because part of your audience is all new to this.

The vendor Apreso had the most elaborate setup. They offered an entire "spa" room that had Nintendo Wii setups so that you could play golf, bowling, tennis etc. They had a coffee bar (I missed the free mojitos night.) and free chair massages. (I got one. It hurt. My neck has been bothering me ever since, but maybe it was the long plane rides to & from NJ.) All that to promote their Anystream podcasting product. I must say, it was a soft sell in the spa.

The best promotion for their Anystream Apreso product was that they were recording all the sessions for podcasts. It's technology that allows colleges to capture lectures and presentations with rich media and automating much of the process of capture, encode, manage and distribute online versions. The sell is that it doesn't require professors to learn new technologies or change the way they teach. This can be set to start, stop and publish automatically. then the content can be made available right away to replay on laptops or iPods.

The session podcasts haven't been made available yet on the EduComm site, so we'll see how they look. I would have been really impressed if they had appeared the next day online. That's what some schools are looking for in recording lectures. It's been 2 weeks and no podcasts. I suspect it's more of the Educomm webmaster than Apreso, but so much for quick turnaround.

I talked to one of their reps and the gentleman who recorded my session about their product. At NJIT, we are not in what seems to be the mainstream for offering podcasted courses. We actually DON"T WANT to record class lectures and have instant posting. We made a very conscious decision more than a year ago to try to have course content chunked into smaller segments and have faculty create content outside of class. We have made only a few attempts to "capture the class."

Part of that comes from NJIT's long history of doing distance learning courses. From the early correspondence course paper model, through cable TV broadcasts, to mailing students VHS tapes and then CDs & DVDs, the school and instructional technology department has been trying to get away from the dreaded 90 minute undergrad and 3 hour grad lectures. That's something you don't want occurring for every class LIVE and we certainly didn't want it online.

I know many big schools that are in iTunes U do the class capture and it does have some value (students who missed class; new person teaching the course) but it's not the engaged learning we want to encourage. I'm also tired of the stories about podcasting at colleges in the press that quote the kid who says, "Now i don't have to go to class." In my opinion, if a 90 minute podcast of your lecture REALLY captures the learning experience of that time, then students shouldn't come to the class. There has got to be some added value in being there. But I digress... it's something I have a lot to say about, and I should say it in another post.