Trip summary -- Stuart Glogoff, Learning Technologies Center; November 6, 2001
I had the opportunity to attend EDUCAUSE 2001: An EDU Odyssey in Indianapolis October 28-31. For me, there were a number of highlights, including the three General Session speakers, touring the exhibit hall, networking with colleagues from other institutions, and visiting a city I hadn't been to for 27 years.
The Promise and Pitfalls of Learning Objects: Current Status of Digital Repositories This was a pre-conference workshop that I attended on Sunday afternoon, October 28th. It was led by Kathleen Bennett, Web Instruction Technologist, and Susan Metros, Professor and Asst VP for Educational Technology at the U. of Tennessee. There were about 25 of us attending this workshop. Its abstract read:
One of the many promises of the future of online learning is a new and intelligent way of creating courses with learning objects or modules that are gleaned from various digital repositories. Whether you are an administrator, IT professional, or faculty member, this innovative and informative pre-conference seminar will provide you with collaborative, hands-on experience (using wireless laptops) for accessing and sharing knowledge and educational content.
The workshop opened with a presentation centered around developing a better understanding of Learning Objects - e.g., incorporating learning objects into instruction; standards; examples. Following this was an overview of the various types of digital repositories.
Open access repositories: MERLOT, GEM, Apple Learning Interchange, Wisconsin Online Resource Center;
Discipline specific repositories: MathGate, BioResearch, Harvey Project, SMETE, Digital Scriptorium;
Commercial repositories: Fathom, XanEdu, Academic Systems.
The rest of the session involved evaluating learning objects and repositories. What made this a useful exercise was that the presenters brought Apple laptop computers configured with a wireless LAN so that we could all work online in real time. Also, we were paired with other workshop participants for the evaluation exercises. The review focused heavily on learning repository pitfalls and future trends. I found that this workshop paralleled initiatives in which Garry Forger and I are engaged.
General Sessions: The three speakers were Sally Ride, astronaut and the first American woman in space, Neil Gershenfeld, director of The Physics And Media Group, MIT Media Lab, and John Seely Brown, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center) and the Chief Innovation Officer of 12 Entrepreneuring.
I greatly enjoyed Sally Ride's presentation. Because she was sponsored by Oracle, in the same way that General Colin Powell was during EDUCAUSE 1999, I like to feel that the U of A played a role in sponsoring them both. Ride received a PhD in astrophysics from Stanford and twice participated as an astronaut in Shuttle missions in the mid-1980s. She spoke on such things as her experiences in space and service on the NASA commission following the Challenger disaster that prepared recommendations for future Shuttle missions. She is co-founder and CEO of Imaginary Lines, Inc., a company dedicated to encouraging more young girls of middle school age to pursue math and science, and is currently a physics professor at UCSD.
Neil Gershenfeld is Director of the MIT Media Lab's Physics and Media Group and his presentation was exhilarating. Gershenfeld spoke on how computation is moving out of traditional computers and into the world around us. He suggests that along the way, this shift is "blurring the boundaries among traditional disciplines and operational units, and even more dramatically among teachers, students, and tools." He is an excellent public speaker and wove some fascinating examples of student work at MIT into the presentation. I picked up a copy of his book When Things Start To Think [SABIO RECORD] in the Indianapolis airport and recommend it. I highly recommend seeing him give a presentation, if you ever have the chance.
John Seely Brown closed the conference with a talk entitled "The Social Life of Information: Learning in the Digital Age." The first part of the title is also the title of a book Brown co-authored with Paul Duguid, a professor at Cal, Berkeley, which I read on the flight to Indy and heartily recommend. Brown described four laws governing the digital age: 1) the laws of computing, 2) communications, 3) storage, and 4) context. Brown is a research scientist and physicist who interprets technology in terms of its impact on such things as education, learning, and knowledge. I enjoyed how he used an image of the cover of Bill Gates' book, The Road Ahead,
Cover image on Gate's The Road Ahead
to lead into a discussion of how "the road ahead" is neither straight, nor isolated. Once people become involved with a technology marvelous changes and new directions are experienced. Read EDUCAUSE's summary "John Seely Brown underscores the social life of information."
One of the best presentations I attended was by Carl Jacobson from the University of Delaware. Jacobson is a director in the UDEL's computer center and was honored this year with one of EDUCAUSE's two Leadership in Information Technology awards. His talk was entitled: "The Institutional Web: A Lens to Living and Learning" and he used the lens metaphor to explain how the Web is key to personalizing resources for our user base, furthering a sense of community, and expanding access through mobile computing. He emphasized how we should strive for "co-production" rather than "self-service" to realize collaboration and cooperation. I liked how Jacobson explained how we don't really make our online resources "self-service" but that human interaction with students, faculty and co-workers leads to changes and enhancements -- hence "co-production."
Two years ago at EDUCAUSE 1999, I was very interested in cruising the exhibits to see as many of the entries in the Web course development arena as possible. There were many! This year one of the things I wanted to see, by touring the exhibit hall and talking to vendors, was how this market has shaken out since then. And it is different. Some of the players who were in Long Beach, were not in Indy - others are far more robust and there were new-to-me players to investigate. In addition to companies that I am relatively familiar with (uCompass, WebCT and Blackboard) I was able to observe Ready Go!, Lectora, eCollege, and Prometheus. One of the features promoted at a number of vendor booths was wireless service to PDAs, e.g., the ability to broadcast course information such as a syllabus to students with wireless service to their Palm OS PDAs. A vendor I was interested in re-visiting after observing the product two years ago in Long Beach was XanEdu, a for-profit resource for online course packs. A faculty member can select copyright cleared scholarly and professional articles from a large database and students then pay what seems to me like a reasonable fee for unlimited access. The rep I spoke to said that there are some UA faculty already using this product -- (if you are I'd love to talk to you about it) and that ASU is somehow more formally involved (I want to check that out).
Garry Forger and I also presented at EDUCAUSE 2001. Our presentation was entitled, "Opening the Pod Bay Doors: Adaptable Metadata for Reusable Instructional Objects." To view our PowerPoint presentation saved to HTML, point your browser to http://www.LTC.arizona.edu/dlearn/meta/podbaydoors_1/sld001.htm. The conference theme was a play on 2001: A Space Odyssey, hence our use of "pod bay doors" in the title. We were pleased with the response we got from the audience and can report that there seem to many others out there in higher education striving to get a handle on metadata and learning repositories.
If there is more information on my conference experience that I can provide you, please feel free to fire off an email. I will be happy to share any of the materials I brought back.