Sitting in the airport. The
conference is over and I’m reflecting on the conference and what I learned. My
thoughts are still pretty random at this point, so I’ll simply list them, and
try to make sense of them later.
- Got links to a lot of sites and online services. It will take me weeks to go through them all and see which ones I will find useful and which I don’t want to mess with. If you found one interesting and decided to use it, let the rest of us know what happened. You can comment to the blog or send me a report by e-mail and I’ll post it for you.
- Came home with a contact person from Newrow. He’s going to help me set up a Newrow session for ENG 6390.OL. Marcela has already e-mailed me and said she’d like to be included. If any of the rest of you think you’d like to join us, let me know. Don’t know when we’ll meet yet, since I want to set up a time when most of the students in the class can log on. But there are only 15 of us. Since Newrow can handle 25, I can take about 10 more participants. (See Newrow report from February 19th.)
- One of my goals with this blog was to provide a “class within a class,” something that provides an intense exposure to a focused area of study within the overall class. I won’t know if I was successful in that endeavor until I get some feedback. Let me know, either by e-mail or a comment on the blog, what you got out of this blog—if anything.
- Simply writing the blog kept me focused during the sessions, more so than usual at a conference. I was surprised to find that I got as much out of the bad presentations as I did out of the good ones, since I had to think about how I was going to report on those sessions, how much information I was going to include, as well as whether I was going to critique the session while reporting on it.
- It’s obvious from the Vender Room—yes, it was officially referred to as the Exhibitor Room; there were more salespeople there than academics, therefore my little change of terminology—that a lot of companies that have made big money off of textbooks are looking to make big money off of online education. I found my cynicism increase every time I went into that room. Yes, I know that there are some IT services that we simply need to outsource. I guess every institution is going to decide to what extent they will outsource as opposed to what they can do in-house. On the other hand, every time I walk into our university bookstore and see how some of these publishers are gigging our students, with the compliance of many faculty, I’m concerned.
Even though the conference is
over, this blog will continue, at least for a few more weeks.
I plan on scanning some handouts I
received, as well as downloading the best stuff from the “Documents” section of
the conference ap. I wasn’t able to copy all the links while in sessions, so I’ll
be reviewing the various handouts and documents for other interesting links. Videos
of some of the major sessions are on the ap. Don’t know if the ap will allow me
to download any or not. I’ll see.
So, keep an eye on this space and
I’ll see what else I can add that will be useful.
Thanks for sharing the conference, Mark. In a way, I felt like I was there participating. I think posting your reactions and interpretations during and after each session made the blog a unique experience. Had you tried to recall and talk about all you learned when you returned, I imagine that would have been a different blog--maybe one with less information. Rather than getting the highlight reel, I felt like I was getting a diverse sample, rich with present knowledge of all the happenings. I also found the different forms you chose on the blog engaging. I was kind of wanting to see or get updates on what kind of activities were happening after hours. ;)
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