It was a good day, and I have to say this has been the best conference I have attended. The presenters (at least the ones I saw) were really all willing to push the normal higher education ideas well beyond their current position. To me, that’s refreshing … I am so sick of the same old, same old in higher ed … the time to adjust some of our outdated models is here.

The hallway talk was even better. I met some great people and I think I’ve established a few interesting connections to folks who will impact my world in the coming weeks and months. All in all, a worthy trip — even I am in New Orleans all by myself without anyone to enjoy the killer jazz with … oh well, more motivation to return!

I was just interviewed by the MOJO students for the podcasting stuff … not even sure what I said, but I most certainly plugged SI and the innovative work going on there. I hope it turns out OK when it is released. They have been talking to all sorts of cool people and the podcasts are so well done … just great to see an idea go from a suggestion to reality so quickly … to be honest we just started talking to the Educause folks about this six weeks ago and they have built a great system! And the MOJO people have done such a first rate job. Very good stuff! Make sure you subscribe to the feed, or just do it the old fashioned way and visit the website.

Dinner tonight is with Apple Digital Campus people to figure out what our online community looks like and how it will be used. Should be very interesting — and oh, we are going to a great place. I have some ideas, and I am sure as the wine starts to be poured I’ll discuss them. Tomorrow is our presentation and then I fly out … whew, worth the trip.

Another great session … this time about how WIKIs can impact teaching and learning. “Adventures in WikiLand,” by Brian Lamb from U of Britich Columbia … More on that in a minute … one of the great things about the presentation is that it is more of a demo than a death by PowerPoint. He started at his own wiki and I went back to the root directory and found that UBC has a whole blogs initiatives going on and then on to University of Minnesota where they have it going as well … man, PSU is behind the times — as usual. I am tired of this and I really think we need a dedicated office whose focus is on emerging technologies … a living, learning lab. Something like SI, but at the University level.

Back to the wiki … he showed just how easy it is to create a new page … and it is very easy. I think we have another new tool to look at for course design, eBook design, and just general coursework. He gave a great example of how the wiki can be used for things like planning … he used the example of planning a camping trip and talked about how much easier (and less email intensive) the wiki is to use for this type of a thing … he showed how it was used for planning and delivering a conference … can you think of examples we should be focusing on for teaching & learning purposes? Another great page from the wiki space. Another cool reference … shows how people write in wikis. How about this quote from WhyWiki:

So I wiki. Why? Because it doesn’t matter. Sure, people might read it, but it is electronic, unreliable, ethereal. It is something I don’t entirely understand. But what I like, what I really enjoy about wiki writing, is that paper never gets the chance to solidify against me.

A funny side note … the guy sitting next to me is geeking out in terminal trying to hack the guy’s wiki as he is talking. He actually went in and changed some of his quotes and links to make his point … whatever.

Now he is getting to wiki in instruction … take a look at some examples. Of course, the audience are all saying, “but aren’t you worried of cheating and plagiarism?” … the speaker is looking at them like we look at people when they say that … “so, its your course, deal with it.” Another good idea is that in group work, with these tools we don’t have to worry about the one kid who understands Dreamweaver making the whole website … the tools get out of the way and let all members of the team contribute. That makes me happy … I know that in my classes, there are a handfull of kids who take over all the technology. We’ll be exploring this stuff more. Some entries on people who walk the talk.

Finally … why not discussion boards vs. wikis … the short answer, “there are no boxes” to constrain the flow. Discussion Boards are good for certain things, but IMHO are way over used in education. Blogs, wikis, and other personal and collaborative publishing systems are poised to take this whole .edu space by storm. We really ought to get out in front … and fast. Great session!

Just a quick note … might be several of these over the next day or two … I am at NLII and just listened to a woman from UT who talked about building good learning opportunities and talked really from the faculty perspective. Interesting use of wireless devices all integrated with a real world, PBL foundation.

One thing they do is run a summer insitute to get faculty engaged in these activities and start to show them the potential … I am wondering if we (at SI) should do something like that. We used to run the faculty academy program, but that was a much larger deal. This would be a simple one day event that would focus on working with faculty and getting them excited about teaching with technology. Just a thought.

She also talked about how they stopped with all the training around the applications (photoshop, dreamweaver, etc) and focused on teaching them how to use tools to build online and hybrid courses. Now we’re talking … teach our faculty how to use D3 and our other courseware design tools. They give grants, we’d offer tools. More to think about.

I am getting set to attend the NLII annual meeting in New Orleans to participate in a session on pervasive computing … as a matter of fact, I think I posted an entry about that and the podcasting we’ll be doing down there. I’ll be doing a bit of my own, solo podcasting during the conference — and probably from New Orleans in general. At any rate, a student worker here at the Solutions Institute and I put together (Carlo did most of the work) a Keynote related to what is podcasting for the show.

Like I posted a while back, Apple has asked me to work with Missouri School of Journalism to make sure the event is covered. The tech group from Educause built a fully RSS-enabled blog space in place for us to handle posts and podcasts from the sessions … I got to see it today and it is really well done! Apple is going to be putting a Mac mini and a whole bunch of iPods out at the registration desk for people to check out and listen to. The mini will be running our presentation and the iPods will have sessions on them as well as some of the content from the Duke iPod project.

Check out the RSS feed next week to listen in. I’ll be posting from New Orleans as the time approaches. At any rate here is the link to the Keynote presentation as a pdf.