Ok, so I attended the 2009 Emerging Tech conference put on by Sloan-C in San Francisco. I want to start by saying it’s the best conference I’ve ever attended. Don’t read too much into that however as the only other conference I’ve attended was the 2007 eLearning DevCon in Salt Lake City and that was dreadful.
As for the Sloan-C conference, it was hosted in San Francisco which besides being unusually sunny and warm while I was there is just a gorgeous city. Lot’s of great places to eat and lot’s of things to see and do, assuming you have any time, which I had very little of. I stayed at the Hyatt Regency in downtown San Francisco because that’s where the conference was held. It’s a beautiful hotel but very pricey and with TERRIBLE (and pricey) wireless Internet service. I learned two things from this experience alone:
- Don’t stay at the conference hotel because of the price
- Don’t stay at the conference hotel because of slow Internet
The conference itself was quite good. There was a good mix of presenters and categories of topics including pedagogy, emerging technologies, administration, programming, and several others. I really enjoyed most of the presentations I attended and met some interesting people – instructional designers, administrators, and faculty.
I do have a couple of criticisms:
- The social networking site used for this conference was abysmal; hardly anyone used it. There was also a twitter feed that worked somewhat better and I’ll talk about that in a moment.
- The conference was – to my mind – a bit corporate; but maybe they are all like that.
Now for the good stuff. The keynote speaker – Richard Katz (of Educause) was very engaging and interesting while talking about cloud computing. The twitter feed was a very engaging and fun to use, although I did get distracted while using it from one of the presentations I was in ; but the conversations we had on twitter and the understanding I gained of the value of twittering while I was distracted, I think, was also valuable learning. I made a lot of twittering friends at this conference.
I learned about some amazing things some universities such as Tufts and Empire State are doing with their distance education programs including classes offered by mobile (Tufts) and complex applications for math and science (Empire State).
I also discovered some awesome technologies for screen capture that would be very useful for me in my work as an instructional designer but also potentially useful for faculty and students as well including Jing, Camtasia Relay, LiveScribe, and Animoto.
Finally I spent quite a bit of time learning about and thinking on subjects that have recently become of interest to me in general and in my work at the Center for Distance Education including: alternate reality gaming and mobile blogging.