Tag Archives: educause

November 13, 2012, 3:00 pm

Accessible Technology (or Lack Thereof) at EDUCAUSE

[This is a guest post by Terrill Thompson, a Technology Accessibility Specialist at
the University of Washington. He may be reaching via email at tft@uw.edu, and you can follow him on Twitter as @TerrillThompson.]

In Denver on the final day of the EDUCAUSE national conference last week, I was wondering two things. First, I wondered whether conference attendees will be impacted by the major winter storm that will soon be descending from the Rockies. Second, I wondered whether we’ll ever see a day when the technology tools we’re using in higher education are easily accessible to all users out of the box.

EDUCAUSE is amazing. There are over 270 exhibitors here, all offering tools and technologies that offer a wide variety of solutions that help academic institutions to fulfill their missions. Of these 270 exhibitors, how many of them do you suppose have products that are fully…

October 25, 2011, 5:13 pm

Some Thoughts About Educause 2011, FOSS, and Experimentation

By George Williams

I spent much of last week attending the 2011 meeting of Educause, an event devoted to information technology in higher education.

Educause (the organization) describes itself as a “nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.” The annual meeting features sessions and workshops but also an enormous exhibit hall where various vendors promote their products, software and hardware alike. As Jason and I wrote last year, there is a great deal of money at stake in this particular market. However much your average faculty member–or administrator, or educational technology staff member–may support free and open source software or the open educational resources movement, you’re not very likely to see much about those things in the exhibit hall (though you might hear a good bit about them in individual…

October 19, 2011, 11:00 am

What Do You Want to Hear from Educause 2011?

By George Williams

As we mentioned last week, ProfHacker is in the house at Educause 2011. If you’re here, too, and you’d like to meet–or if you’d like us to stop by your booth–please let us know!

And for those of you who aren’t attending, what do you want to hear about? Check out the conference program here: http://www.educause.edu/E2011/Program/F2F. What questions do you have about IT and higher ed that might be answered by panelists, vendors, or attendees? Please let us know in the comments!

UPDATE: If you’re attending, please leave us some comments describing your experience this year. What trends do you see? What concerns do you have? What have you found most interesting? What have you found most frustrating?

Each Wednesday, ProfHacker hosts an open thread discussion. Sometimes a specific topic is announced, and sometimes the discussion is completely open. Please remember to abide by our

October 12, 2011, 7:24 pm

ProfHacker at Educause 2011

By Prof. Hacker

Jason and George will be attending Educause 2011 in Philadelphia next week. (You might remember our post about Educause 2010.) This time around our hope is to get to more of the sessions, see more of the conference, talk to more of the attendees.

We thought we’d let you know up front so that if you’re attending, you might let us know if you’d to meet up: ProfHackerCHE@gmail.com.

Have some recommendations for sessions we should attend, booths we should visit? Know of some Philadelphia restaurants we absolutely shouldn’t miss?

Please share in the comments. Thanks!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Michael Murphy]

October 21, 2010, 3:00 pm

ProfHacker Goes to Educause

By Prof. Hacker

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, …