Renegade Element

My education at Educause.

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This year marked my first time at the EDUCAUSE national conference. In case you haven’t experienced it, this conference is on an entirely new level for me. Almost 7,000 attendees milled the halls of the Anaheim Convention Center 12-15 October, and another thousand watching the streamed events online. From my perspective, it was seriously overwhelming.


I arrived early to present a pre-conference workshop on Managing Your Social Media, and my attendees were largely administrators and IT professionals who wanted to better understand social media. While they recognized the popularity of social media and were interested in integrating it at their institution, they were concerned about productivity lost in the workplace and handling critical posting and commenting in online forums. Basic concepts discussed included community building opportunities for both staff as well as students, building community engagement, moderating and guiding communities as opposed to controlling, and how to handle negative commenting and posting. Significant interest in Facebook management took us off-roading from the established plan but highlighted a major theme I’ve seen within higher ed social media–leveraging existing facebook communities to extend marketing, recruiting, and educational efforts. It makes sense, and has convinced me to get more involved with Facebook administration, if only to help show others how.

Getting my workshop out of the way first allowed me to explore EDUCAUSE. The options of presentations and topics was insane; and yet, many of the ones I attended were at capacity, so I can see how that many offerings are necessary for the amount of attendees. The general session keynotes were helpful to start out the day, but I will admit that the next step was harder. Given the group I work with, I decided to explore some of the social media efforts being led across the country. To this end, these are the specific sessions I sought out to complement the overview of the general sessions.


Top-10 Questions to Consider When Implementing Social Media: Perspectives of Different Campuses: One of the few sessions I knew I wanted to see before I went to EDUCAUSE, it included Shannon Ritter (one of my favorite Penn State people in social media), AJ Kelton (Montclair State University), and Tanya Joosten (University Wisconsin at Milwaukee), who I really wanted to meet face-to-face after following her online for so long. Very similar outlooks in terms of how social media can engage students, but offered the added benefit of doing so from a pedagogical standpoint. The theme here? Social media can be guided, but not controlled. Trust authenticity, and trust the people you have working for you in social media.

Classroom Engagement in the Age of Cell Phones and Social Media: A presentation from the folks at Purdue that discussed their use of Hotseat to enable students to engage in classroom discussion using Twitter, Facebook, or a mobile device–much like how we use the Harvard Question Tool here at ETS. I like the fact they incorporate Facebook and text messaging from a mobile phone; that’s something I haven’t seen done with the Harvard Question Tool. I think the evidence of higher student participation clearly makes this a “no brainer” as a way to capture the low hanging fruit and boost student engagement in large lecture classes. 
Social Media Discussion Session: A breakout discussion session, it was very interesting to see many of the same faces that attended my pre-conference workshop. Tanya and Shannon have begun building an impressive resource at http://www.edusocmedia.org/ and elsewhere online and on twitter using the hashtag #edusocmedia. This is probably one of the best takeaways from EDUCAUSE for me, as it provides a jumping off point for building resources in a common location. I’ll be watching as more is added in the coming months.

Blogging About Educational Technology: A Discussion for Current and Prospective Bloggers: A panel discussion that covered the pros, cons, pitfalls, and advantages of starting and maintaining your own educational technology blog. Additionally, how to manage comments, criticism, and the like. Great point on backchannel: that the tech blogging community is quickest when it’s angry. While I found this interesting, not sure it was useful personally. One of my biggest challenges now is to integrate blogging on my work in progress on basic technology, while I walk about all the other things we do. Still a work in progress for me personally, but helpful when doing outreach to the Penn State community.
Seriously, this was a huge conference. It reminded me a lot of Web 2.0 Expo in NYC last year, mostly because of two things: the sheer mass of people attending, and the huge vendor presence. I’m still undecided about the advantage of having that many vendors hawking their products, applications, and solutions to the educational community. I understand the reality of underwriting a conference this size, but there was very little ability to really explore the vendor exhibits without feeling like I was simply trick-or-treating for swag. It also begs the question, “Is this what our educational dollars go toward–competing for boasting rights of the best exhibitor booth, coolest swag, hottest party, or most amazing giveaway?” Don’t get me wrong. I gladly participated in each of these activities, but not without a voice in my ear asking me if it wasn’t a little hypocritical of me to do so. To quote one of my favorite authors, Robert Heinlein, “Tanstaafl.”*

Attending EDUCAUSE had one unanticipated effect (which I would venture to guess was only unanticipated by me; my boss is scary smart like that): it brought me in touch with a very large, very different community that pushed my focus on technology more into the pedagogical arena. (Also, please note I’ve used that word twice in one post. TWICE.) By sheer numbers, more people were talking about teaching and learning at once than I’ve ever been exposed to before. I see where this is going, and probably have a better sense of where I fit into the process than I ever did before. Which means, in the end, my boss is not only smart but right all along, and worse, I’ve probably grown a bit as a person.
I hate it when that happens.
*there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Comments

  1. Growing is good … very hard at times, but very good. I am still overwhelmed by the size of Educause and up until this year I haven’t really enjoyed it. I typically go to ELI as it seems to have a size and focus that is much more in my comfort areas. This year I forced myself to stretch beyond the standard stuff for me and spent quite a bit of time looking at issues that I don’t think as much about as I should.
    I am thrilled you went and that you got a lot out of it. Going to conferences is a difficult thing in a lot of ways … learning how to manage your energy and pick the rest sessions. Looks like you were able to pick good sessions and I know you have more energy than anyone I know!

    Reply

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