CIC CIO Ongoing Thoughts

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Some of this was already posted in the Stuff blog, I thought I'd replicate the complete set here.  I'll keep editing this page as the conference goes on.



Chuck Severance is giving the kickoff talk at the CIC CIO Techforum.  I don't spend most of my day thinking about high performance computing, but Chuck has.  He has some interesting insight into how Google manages to scale (massive global replication on cheap hardware) and choosing between local supercomputing resources and remote data centers.

He is also talking about using tools like Google Apps to integrate with course management tools, which should enable course management systems to include the best-of-breed applications.  Cloudsocial adds a learning management bar on enabled pages that ties back into your course management system.  He thinks that this is the future of open educational resources.  Idea for baby cloud computing - give each student their own cPanel-based Web space to take control of their learning.  A lot of this is reminding me of Cole's post after his trip to the OpenEd conference with more of an emphasis on the intersection of IT Infrastructure than purely teaching and learning.



I'm in a session about Northwestern University is using social computing.  They are using it mostly for external push communication to students.  Not too much different than what ETS doing to get messages out to faculty and the learning design community, but I don't think we have an ITS-wide strategy to get information to students.  Maybe Marcus is working on something?  The speaker, Sherry Minton, said that they implemented a weekly blog, but turned off the commenting so they could control the message.  Part of our presentation today is going to cover what happens when you let go of the control when working with groups like IDs, technologists, and faculty. [Maybe students as well, but I don't work directly with groups of students.]

Indiana University has mainly been focusing on using Facebook to communicate with students about things like alerts, reminders, events, etc...  Charles Rondot said that they have their wall open so anyone can post.  There was some initial fear about this, but after a year, there hasn't been a problem.  They have 1600 fans on Facebook. Using social networking to communicate with an audience is much like being the host of a party; until things get going, you have to go around to engage people and keep things fresh.  He's also very realistic about this being only part of a communication strategy and that technologies like Facebook are transient.

Paul Baepler is talking about their digital idea stream, which is a lot like the Lightning Talk presentations (5 minute presentation with 2 minute Q&A). He agrees that this adds a game-show-like atmosphere to the presentation.  He recommends Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. 

Paul is switching to Pecha Kucha (sounds like pechachka) - PowerPoint on adrenaline, Presentation Haiku.  20 slides, 20 seconds each = 6:40 presentation.  Spend an evening seeing a bunch of these.  Lawrence Lessig's presentation was mentioned as a variation of this (even less time per slide).  Ignite format = 20 slides x 15 seconds each = five minutes.  WAM Chatter: presented the question "What is News Now?" and had three people present their Pecha Kuchas on that question.  Speed Geeking - timed rotations around tables with different topics.  Good times.

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