Urgency Detected at EDUCAUSE 2010

My overall impression is that we are approaching a large transition in higher education. For the past few years, the 'early adopters' of our latest education technologies have had their time blazing trails. Based upon the general feel of this conference, I think we are moving past the time of the 'early adopters' and moving toward the next logical phase of broader acceptance and adoption by education in general. The presentations, themes and perhaps most importantly, the informal discussions at this conference all seem to indicate a real sense of urgency to get moving on the emerging trends. This is quite different than my previous experiences the last 18 months at these higher education conferences. At those, yes, many of the same topics were discussed but I always sensed a bit of "yeah, that's interesting but..." attitude. At this Educause, people were hungry. Additionally, there were few, if any 'naysayers' in the sessions (at least in those that asked questions or commented during the sessions). The lack of naysayers may be as much of an indicator as the other things I've described.

For example, I went to a general discussion session centered around the iPad and it's impact at this stage in it's life cycle. It was an absolute overpacked room. People lined the walls on 3 sides of the room. People stood in the hall to listen in who would have no chance of actively participating. This was not even a presentation but rather more closely resembled the format of a classic support group gathering. Attendees were just asked to talk about their experiences in the 'state your name and your organization first' format. Some were Apple geeks there to talk about how much they love their iPad. Some had stories of pilots or soon to be pilots in the classroom. What was much more interesting, however, were those in attendance who don't even have an iPad who were simply seeking help because they've already seen impact at their campuses because of it. Now, to keep things in perspective, this discussion is centered around a piece of technology that has only been on the market for 7 months. No matter where you fall in the current conversation about the iPad, the impact is real. I'm not sure I would classify the atmosphere as 'panic' but there is no question the theme was urgency. As in 'what are we going to do with this in the next year?'

Another session I attended was on the lessons learned in mobile learning at Abilene Christian University in Texas. In a major initiative, ACU handed out either iPod touches or iPhones to students. They presented the methods, tools and their latest assessment data on this initiative which, as expected, were generally very positive. While there was some great information in this presentation, the most resonating piece came near the end when one of the faculty members with over 20 years of experience shared what I thought was a very interesting tidbit. In the initiative, he adopted using an iPhone and made himself available to students via IM and text. He noticed that he was able to have more frequent touch points with students outside the classroom, yet he didn't feel he was dedicating more time outside the classroom than before. An unexpected result? Students evaluating him after the semester gave him the highest "is approachable" scores EVER for him. Think of the irony and perception of today's students in giving him that score: he's more approachable because he communicated with them remotely in the technology that they use. He added that he was pretty sure he had not altered his personality for that particular semester and that we 'too old' to do that anyway. ACU's technical person in the presentation admitted that he's not convinced that mobile technologies are any more revolutionary that other technologies emerging BUT this initiative seem to have changed the culture at the university in that it seems to have fostered a spirit of innovation. They stated that there is an engagement with faculty and technical resources that has never been seen before.

I'll describe this more in a later post, but another over-flow crowd filled in for a session titled "The LMS is Dead". Ironic since the presenter, Adrian Sannier is a now an evangelist/shill for Pearson's eCollege LMS. Adrian, a long time faculty and executive at various universities, pointed out the number of ways LMS/CMS' have failed to transform teaching and learning in the past decade. His description was so right-on about the current functioning LMS/CMS:

Essentially core LMS/CMS functions that are now free with apps like Google Docs. No one even challenged this part of his presentation. In the informal chats afterwards it was much of the same, 'LMS', if necessary at all, need to give MUCH MORE VALUE than what we've seen'.

These are just some of the anecdotal experiences I had at EDUCAUSE but I could not escape the fact that I could feel this shift in attitude. One that says, 'OK, now it's time to get serious'. We can speculate on my accuracy of this reading as well as the drivers for these attitudes but I feel the sense of urgency is real out there. Want one more indicator? OK, how's this: I have not seen vendors layout money for free schmoozing stuff like this since...I have to go back to 1997. The schedule of relatively lavish client events was impressive in today's economy. That tells me that some of these big time vendors such as Blackboard and Pearson have made strategic decisions to impress because they probably know a lot of big-time technology decisions are right around the corner. And in no time will recoup their investment in throwing client parties.