Tech Ed 06

I did a presentation at Tech Ed 06 in Pasadena today called "Online Services that Truly Serve Students" (ppt slides can be found on the "Recent Presentations" link to the right). My presentation started at 8:00 AM and given the weather today I didn't expect a lot of attendance (I left home at 5:00 AM just to make sure I wasn't late, but then again, I have a punctuality neurosis). As I expected there were only about 8 people when I started, but more and more arrived as I got going, and by the end it was standing room only and there were people in the hallway. (Reality Check #1: OK, so I was in the smallest room in the Pasadena Convention Center) (Reality Check #2: Well, "room" is actually a tad generous - it was more the size of a closet, but once I moved the mops everyone could see the screen).

I heard some great feedback afterwards and several people mentioned how it was nice to see systems that are designed to be student-centric. It's good that people caught that (since it's the theme of virtually all of my presentations), but it's sad that it stands out. Too many people in my field are chasing technology instead of serving students.

I also got to meet Bob Hughes from the North Orange district in person (he commented on my last post). He was a heck of a nice guy - even if he does like the ERPs (don't worry - I'll keep working on him).

If anyone who was at the session is reading this, I need to make sure I didn't leave you with a wrong impression. I closed the presentation with a demonstration of MySite Agent - it's an interactive agent we built that can respond to natural language queries using the AIM instant messaging service. I use it in the demo to show that we don't always get it right. In this case, I think the technology gets in the way of service and students just play with it instead of using it in a productive way. I just flat out said that we failed with that service because of the quantity and quality of the service it was providing. I was talking to a lady later in the day and she thought I was talking about all of the services I demonstrated. She didn't understand why students were not using our portal, online schedule and shopping cart when they looked so cool. So, in case anyone else had that impression, our other services are very popular - it's just the agent that doesn't get much usage.

CACCRAO Conference

I had the great privilege of speaking at the CACCRAO Region 7 and 8 conference on Friday. What is CACCRAO, you ask? It is the California Association of Community College Registrars and Admissions Officers (sheesh, and I thought us geeks like acronyms). I gave my iPod Generation speech and it was probably the best audience so far. I had a great time and the feedback I received was very appreciative (and if any of you that were there are reading my lonely little blog - welcome!).

Those folks really do have a monumental job. This generation of students is so used to having immediate service I can imagine they get pretty impatient when told they need to wait for something. I could tell I struck a nerve when I talked about that. Their jobs are changing - in the old days they simply processed data. They took information from the student and keypunched into a system. As more and more of our systems become self-service for the student, admissions workers need to transition to become information workers. They'll be handling the exceptions that can't be automated, or providing more useful information for students in need. I would think it would be more fulfilling work and I hope they are ready for the transition.

League for Innovation Part 2

I did two presentations today. Audiences were small but enthusiastic (which I guess is better than large and hostile). The theme I kept hearing in conversations afterwards was how they wished they could do similar things at their college, but couldn't because they had an ERP. One person did say that he liked PeopleSoft, but that was the lone exception. It just affirmed once again that owning our architecture is the right way to go. It's a lot of work and carries its own set of risks, but I think we are on the right track.

I went to a session in the afternoon that made coming to this conference worth it. Mark Champion from Grand Rapids Community College did a presentation on the future of community colleges. He has a web site where he will post the slides within a week. It was everything a session at a conference like this should be: well researched, challenging and thought provoking. In a nutshell, community colleges are facing a huge challenge (which he backed up with demographic studies) and we need to change the way we do business to remain relevant. And (surprise, surprise) the best way for us to do it is through technology. He brought up a lot of the same points I have been talking about at our colleges - that this new generation of students think and learn differently than us and we need to leverage those differences to make learning a more compelling experience. Great stuff!

I'm heading back home tomorrow and am really looking forward to it. I do just enough business travel to remember why I would never want to do this on a regular basis.

League for Innovation Part 1

Well, yesterday I was fairly underwhelmed with the sessions I went to at this conference. If this is the state of innovation at community colleges in this country, then we are in pretty sad shape. I have to keep reminding myself that this is not a technology conference (which should be obvious to me since normal people (non-geeks) dress a lot sharper), but I was really hoping to get inspired by what some other folks are doing.

One session was interesting, not just for the content, but because of my reaction to it. Foothill College created an online counseling system that they demonstrated. I caught myself looking down on it because it wasn't using anything fancy - just a web based forum and email. The speaker pointed out that the simplicity of it was part of what made it successful, and that's really the point, isn't it? What they built works for their counselors and their students, and at the end of the day, that's why we are here - service to students. It was a good reminder that I need to keep my eye on the ball.

Innovations 2006

I'm in Atlanta at the League for Innovation in the Community College conference - Innovations 2006. I'm doing two presentations on Tuesday and the slides can be found by clicking on the "Recent Presentations" link to the right. I'll post anything interesting I run across while I'm here.

Creating Passionate Users

There are a number of great blogs I read on a regular basis. I'm going to post an article soon that describes how I search, discover and track blogs, but I really want to highlight one of my favorite: Creating Passionate Users. It is written by three authors, who are (according to their site), "all passionate about the brain and metacognition, most especially--how the brain works and how to exploit it for better learning and memory".

It's a great site for educators, technologists and especially educational technologists.

Bb World Panel Discussion

The panel discussion I was on last week at Blackboard World turned out to be pretty interesting. We actually wound up with a whopping 20 people in the audience, which was about 18 more than I expected. There were 7 of us on the panel - 3 were from community colleges, two from private universities (USC and Loma Linda) and 2 were from CSUs. We were each asked to share something about our use of Blackboard and specifically how we managed and/or encouraged growth. All three of the community college reps talked about the mechanics of our implementation - server integration, support, etc. The universities mostly talked about faculty training, mentoring, etc.

The person next to me on the panel was James Frazee, the Director of Instructional Technology Services at SDSU. Real nice guy - he showed us a great program called TechStars they use to encourage faculty in the use of technology. He told me he has a staff of about 25 people who do nothing but work with faculty and their use of technology. What an amazing resource! What a great focus for an organization to have - to help faculty help students learn with technology. I don't know of any community college that has anything like it - or even close.

Clearly it's at least partially an issue of funding - the public universities in California get an enormous amount of money compared to community colleges - but I can't help but wonder if it's also an issue of priorities. Why don't we spend more time and money helping faculty with technology? Is it just money, or is it also a matter of institutional focus?

Blackboard World '06

I'm at the Blackboard World conference in San Diego and will be on a panel discussion today showcasing some of the California universities and colleges. We got the very last time slot in the conference (11:00 - 12:30) so I expect about 2 people in the audience. (Sorry about the quality of the picture - it's from my camera phone).

It's very interesting to see how far Blackboard has come. I first saw them in a tiny booth at the Educause conference in Seattle in 1998. There were about 5 people in the booth - none of them looking older than a recent college grad. They had a reception that night where they introduced their first "adult" (typical .com startup lingo) who was their new CEO. Walking into the San Diego Convention Center and seeing the dozens of companies that now contribute to helping Blackboard succeed was pretty amazing. It's indicative of how much higher education has changed recently - a change that is not going to stop, but just accelerate.

I went to several interesting panel discussions yesterday. One of them, "The Future of eLearning" can be seen on Ready2Net. A couple of statements stood out for me. One of the panelists said that he/she (don't remember which) was waiting for the time when we would just start calling it learning instead of eLearning. In other words the "e" is here to stay.

The second was a statement from the representative from the University of Phoenix. He recounted a conversation he had with a friend from the CSU system who told him that once we got our act together in the public sector of higher ed, we were going to eat his lunch. His response was: "Your faculty are our secret weapon". I think that was a very telling statement and a challenge to all of us in higher education. We need to bring our resources to bear - for the sake of our students - without compromising the quality of the education. I strongly believe technology is the way to do that, and all of us (faculty and administrators) need to keep focused on how students learn best in the new digital world.

We have a lot of plans forming at the South Orange County CCD along these lines and I'm excited about what is going to be happening (hopefully) soon. More to follow...