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.
2 comments:
Hi Jim,
I agree that yesterday was pretty underwhelming. I attended one good, one fair, and two lousy presentations. Of course, I'm a pretty harsh critic of these conference presentations that are either a) one-way communication only, b) very much old news, nothing new or innovative, c) have not even a vague resemblance to the session description, d) simply read their PPT slides to me, e) tell me about something they are GOING to do rather than have done, f) or some icky combination of the above.
On the bright side, I attended a very good session this morning about the online course schedule tool that has been created by some geek (and his design team) in Orange County CA. Good presenter, great student-friendly tool, innovative ideas, something that has already been proven successful, and a live demo rather than just PPT slides.
It was a pleasure, thanks much. Barry Dahl
Lake Superior College
Barry:
Thanks for the kind words. You summarized my frustrations with this conference (and really all of them) very nicely. I was really tempted to show some of the things we're working on right now, but we have a policy to not show work that isn't in production. We'll leave the vaporware to the vendors.
I checked out your blog and enjoyed it - good work!
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