Last week, as part of its coverage of the 2010 Educause conference, the Chronicle sent George and Jason to spread the good word about ProfHacker. This was the first time either of us had ever been to this conference/bazaar, and so this post won’t be a proper review, but rather a set of joint impressions. (You can see tons of reporting from the conference floor at Wired Campus.)
If you’ve never heard of Educause, it is a “nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.” What’s genuinely outstanding about Educause is that it brings together groups of people who don’t always talk productively: CIOs, directors of academic or administrative technology, ed tech folks, faculty, provosts, university presidents, and more. It also brings these groups together in the presence of technology vendors, which is another voice that isn’t always heard very clearly on campus.
The annual meeting is a little weird, in that there are all these rooms where very cool sessions and workshops are taking place, often about homegrown, open-source technologies. And then there’s this massive exhibit hall, where Blackboard and Lenovo and Dell and Adobe and a dizzying array of vendors hawk their wares educate people with purchasing budgets about where they should spend their money. (Joshua Kim characterizes this as the difference between the conference and the Conference at Educause, and while we might reverse his capitalization choices, the distinction’s basically apt.)
The first thing that we want to say is that the promise of Educause–those conversations among disparate groups–is real. In addition to meeting people like Baylor’s Gardner Campbell, who is so electrically inspiring in conversation that he should be tattooed with a warning label, one can also discover vast cohorts of people working on similar problems as you, but from different disciplinary or employment vantage points. For example, George has been researching accessibility issues and universal design principles from a digital humanities perspective for the last eighteen months or so, but Educause 2010 was the first time he ran into so many people addressing these issues and principles in a digital environment. The majority of these people are CIOs or ed tech staff, rather than faculty; there just aren’t that many other venues where this combination of people is going to be engaged in such cross-pollinating conversations.
And in so many ways, Educause and its participants get what’s interesting about some of this technology. Each session–and there were many sessions!–was assigned its own Twitter hashtag to facilitate “backchannel” discussion. Conference-goers were able to stay online just about everywhere, thanks to a very strong wireless signal available throughout the conference venue. Even when you’re not at the conference, you can get an account on the Educause server, create a profile that includes your interests, use an “Affinity Finder” to identify others with similar interests, create wiki/blog pages, and more. The conference even provides pretty cool stickers, which more meetings should do. We’re suckers for stickers.
To get a feel for what’s disturbing about the conference, however, take another look at the sticker in the bottom right, which had the meeting’s slogan: Uncommon Thinking for the Common Good.
This slogan is sheer ideology, when viewed from the perspective of the exhibit hall. Because it turns out that the thinking was perfectly common: “There’s nothing wrong with higher ed that a massive purchase order or site license can’t solve.” Far from uncommon, this is simply the apotheosis of higher education’s thirty-year change from a public good to a commodity.
Relatedly, the conference suffers dramatically from the absence of publicly-voiced skepticism about technology. (Said the editors of ProfHacker–not exactly neo-Luddites!) There’s an unusually high percentage of technofuturist rhetoric in play. (“Why can’t an MBA be $250?,” someone asked. And instead of laughing in the person’s face, there’s a pretense that this is somehow a profound point.)
But what’s really–not to put too fine a point on it–genuinely rotten about Educause is signs like this one:
That party, complete with drinks and other blandishments–and only one corporate-sponsored party among many at Educause–came a day or two after the announcement that Blackboard has signed a deal to provide content for remedial courses. If you like, the drinks at their “Hang 10.0 Surf Social” were bought with faculty jobs, and by the systematic dismantling of public education at all levels in this country. ( It’s not just the parties, either: In the exhibit hall, if you didn’t win an iPad, you probably weren’t trying very hard. There’s something a little unseemly, in higher education, of the richest and most secure entering lotteries for more baubles, while plotting the further marginalization of our most vulnerable colleagues.)
The split that’s evident at Educause is an important one. On the one hand, you have a vision of a university education as “content” that can be delivered equally well by a platform as by a faculty member, a world in which the members of a university community are all “constituents” linked by a top-down implementation of a technology solution. On the other hand, there’s a vision of technology as facilitating conversations and exchanges of ideas and tool-building–precisely a world in which ideas complete, rather than compete with, one another.
Important structural changes threaten higher education, many of them technologically driven. We fear that some in higher ed don’t realize just how starkly these changes loom. Critiquing these threatened changes is important, of course, but actively participating in the process by which these decisions are being made is extremely important. In short, people from your campus should be at Educause, and they should advocate for a higher education system that’s humane and sustainable. Unless you think a $250 MBA is a good idea.
Image by Flickr user Martin Dougiamas / Creative Commons licensed
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10 Responses to ProfHacker Goes to Educause
rpaterson - October 22, 2010 at 8:26 am
Excellant post. For someone who has been attending EDUCAUSE (and prior to that Cause and EDUCOM) for many years, you have identified issues many of us have. And EDUCAUSE as an entity contiunes to develop an Association, which existes for its own right as opposed to being a mechanism to bring together a group of folks from higher ed to discuss how technolgy might impact the learning process…Since this was your first, find some CIOs that have gone for awhile and understand the history…it may shed some light…
catlkelley - October 22, 2010 at 9:16 am
Spot-on, including both the positives and MANY negatives of this conference. The big parties sickened me to the point that I won’t go to Educause any more unless I have some super-compelling reason. For the past few years, I haven’t felt too pushed. It is too big, too fake, too unencumbered by thoughtful consideration of what the heck we’re doing.
And the money … I got weary of Educause years ago when it was held in Nashville and Microsoft hosted a huge party on the banks of the river, complete with free beer, a “name” country & western band (I forget which one, but I am not a C&W fan and I recognized the name), and a fireworks display that kicked my township’s municipal annual July 4 display in the butt. The huge waste of money sickened me, because you know who paid for it? All of us, via inflated licensing costs.
The annual Blackboard debauch (that is most definitely the correct word for it) is also notorious and sickening, and goes a long way towards my consideration of open-source alternatives. If the company re-directed its party budget to product development, the product would be a LOT better. I’d rather have fewer parties along with fewer bugs in my product. Another point which should be made is that most of these parties, but especially the Blackboard one, are not female-friendly. Bb is run by former frat boys, in my observation.
And I became nauseated by my own trolling through the vendor booths looking for crummy, pointless free stuff (which I paid for later by having to cope with endless calls from the tech vendors who gave me this rubbish in exchange for my business card or in later years, the swipe-card thing that they give you).
Bleah. No thanks.
vandoesborgh - October 22, 2010 at 9:50 am
Thank you for relaying the event as it really was. This is why I turn to ProfHacker for my daily dose of educational insight. Keep up the fight to keep education in the forefront of what we do!
theresamrowe - October 22, 2010 at 10:01 am
There were so many valuable sessions that went far beyond the negatives that you point out. It is possible to have a high-quality experience and totally skip all the vendor events (you aren’t forced to attend).
If you are interested in responding to faculty needs for mobile computing and high-quality technology in support of teaching and research, then there was much to keep you engaged. Most attendees have requests from faculty that require high-quality technology provisioning, and we seek best practices from our peers.
Or perhaps you were interested in learning more about accessibility and reaching communities with special needs on your campus; there were valuable sessions and an entire booth space dedicated to accessibility on the vendor floor.
Maybe you have responsibilities around privacy of data or security of networks. Perhaps you were interested in protecting data associated with research. There were many valuable sessions, and with one stop in a short time frame, you could meet with quality vendors providing a variety of solutions that enable higher ed IT organizations to meet growing security requirements.
All of us – faculty and the dedicated staff that support faculty – are facing changes in the industry. The best way to not feel threatened is to get in front of the curve and help shape the future. That engagement is possible at this conference.
ericstoller - October 22, 2010 at 10:55 am
Having written several posts myself about #EDUCAUSE10, I appreciate this point of view. I thoroughly enjoyed the conference, but I really feel that this post needed to be written. The conference was a combination of what theresamrowe and the author have written. I’m glad that this was written. Kudos ProfHacker.
george_h_williams - October 22, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Thanks, everyone, for your feedback!
@theresamrowe: Neither I nor (I’m pretty sure) Jason would disagree with the idea that the positive aspects of attending Educause far outweigh the negatives. That’s not really the point of this post. Instead, the negative that we did point out–the exhibit hall’s philosophy of “There’s nothing wrong with higher ed that a massive purchase order or site license can’t solve.”–is brought up *not* as a criticism of Educause but rather as very real evidence of some not-so-welcome changes taking place in higher education. In my experience, one is not often confronted with that evidence in such a dramatic and unselfconscious way as at the Educause exhibit hall. Whether we choose to attend the exhibit hall or not is beside the point: we might enjoy our experience at Educause more if we do so, but that won’t change what’s happening to higher ed.
As for your last point–”All of us – faculty and the dedicated staff that support faculty – are facing changes in the industry. The best way to not feel threatened is to get in front of the curve and help shape the future. That engagement is possible at this conference.”–I could not agree more emphatically! Well said.
1564789 - October 22, 2010 at 4:57 pm
I’ve never attended the main Educause conference, but have attended several of their regional, more-focused conferences (Educause Learning Initiative). If you’re looking for good conferences without the vendor distractions, you might consider one of those.
windygap96 - October 22, 2010 at 7:25 pm
I always recommend people approach the exhibit hall from a learning perspective. Take the opportunity to look beyond those companies with the huge marketing budgets and educate yourself on what is out there. Educause does a great job helping you identify the types of technologies and grouping them in the program so that you can focus your sights on your institutional needs and seek out the vendors that can help you tackle these needs. If all you saw were the iPad give aways you missed an opportunity to discover some new applications that might just solve some real institutional needs.
v8573254 - October 24, 2010 at 12:58 pm
The tech world is not the only one that creates dissonance. One of the big literacy groups produces the same reactions in me.
jacksuess - October 24, 2010 at 10:16 pm
First, let me publicly thank the author’s of prof-hacker for attending the EDUCAUSE conference. As a member of the program committee we greatly value faculty attending the conference and sharing their perspective. I very much enjoy the prof-hacker articles in the Chronicle and got the opportunity to meet with the authors at one of the events. I did want to make a few comments regarding two criticisms of the conference. These criticism’s focused on the commercialism found at the conference and our underlying belief in the benefit of technology.
To the first point on commercialism, this problem of vendor concentration and broader dependence on commercial support cuts across all aspects of higher education, not just technology. That said, pointing at the vendor hall or the “Sponsored by Blackboard “sign as a indication we have turned technology innovation over to vendors does a disservice to our community and to the conference. This criticism downplays all the sessions and excitement over community-source efforts such as Uportal, Sakai, InCommon, Moodle, or Kuali. All of these efforts were well represented at the conference and are major initiatives in the community to augment or provide alternatives to commercial products. At the same time, no campus can deploy a rich set of technology services without commercial vendors and the vendor exhibit is the one place where you can interact with many of the small vendors that are a great source of that innovation. While some vendors go over top, I’d say it is an important element of the conference.
One area I would like to see discussed by prof-hacker in future articles is the Next Generation Learner Challenge (NGLC) that was announced at the conference and highlighted in a number of sessions. EDUCAUSE, through a grant from the Gates Foundation, is taking a leadership role in trying to find ways to use technology to systemically address some of the barriers to student success. This initiative will require close cooperation between faculty, administrators, and IT professionals and could be an alternative to Blackboard’s support for remedial education highlighted in the post.
On the second point of criticism regarding our underlying belief in the benefit of technology and thus a lack of balance in our general speakers. I think the three general session speakers highlighted the opportunity for innovation (Hamel), the importance of faculty innovation (Gershenfeld), and the practical aspects of successful change (Koester). I don’t know if prof-hacker had a chance to stay for the closing general session talk given by Dr. Jolene Koester, President of California State University, Northridge. She gave a wonderful talk highlighting the importance for IT leaders to build trusting partnerships with the academic units by emphasizing two-way communication and thoughtfully planning changes.
All of that aside, I again want to thank prof-hacker for their work in the Chronicle and for coming to the conference. Hopefully, they will continue to push innovative uses of technology in their articles and attend the conference in the future. This will only encourage more faculty to attend and give feedback. That feedback is what we use to plan the program and will help us make the conference even better.