SXSWedu day 1

Well, it's finally here. I've been thinking about coming to SXSWedu for more than a year, and with the support of several key people (shout outs to Dean Zeigler, TLC honchos Sweet and Blythe, and Noel boss Carpenter) I'm soaking up the energy of this conference and the host city of Austin, TX. I'll start with some general comments about the conference, and then some highlights of the sessions I attended today.

General Comments

This is a huge conference. Not as big as some of the major disciplinary conferences I've been to like APA and APS, but still sizable. The audience is more varied than I'm used to seeing at psychology conferences. There are lots of K12 teachers, passionate advocates all, and many quite young. But there aren't the horde of graduate students here I'm used to seeing. Doesn't make me feel quite so old. There are also the more familiar faculty types. The other less-familiar bunch are the people representing start-ups of all kinds. The panelists at one of the sessions I attended walked out into the crowd to 'interview' audience members, roving-reporter style. Many of the interviewees introduced themselves, and their affiliations took almost as much 'airtime' as their comments. This industry is new to me, or at least the extent of it. That's something I'll keep an eye on for the next three days.

Sessions

Temple Grandin. 

I've seen Grandin speak before, but it was still entertaining to see her today. She really seemed

to have a good time in front of a large capacity crowd -- unusual for someone with Autism. Someone even asked in the Q&A if she enjoyed giving talks like this, and she said it took some getting used to. There was a momentary technical glitch (embarrassing for such a technology-enfused event) involving her slides, and she was clearly disturbed by the prospect of presenting without them. Her main points were familiar to anyone who has heard her or watched her online: people think in different ways, we need to design our pedagogies to accommodate these various ways of thinking, and that there are many highly successful people 'on the spectrum'. She added 'keep Austin weird' several times, to the enjoyment of the crowd.

Wisdom of Higher Ed Pioneers in 7 Minutes or Less

They really packed a lot of info into this session. I'm not sure how these 8 presenters were affiliated, other than they were all interested in innovation, broadly speaking. Here are some of the important ideas: innovation and scalability are important, but diffusion of innovation is key; higher ed needs to credential smaller bits of education to prepare future students for the future job market; the 5th wave of evolution of higher ed will need to work on all scales (individual learners and large groups), and teachers need to get off the stage and work to create personalizable learning environments; we can't let the publishing companies keep the data about learning behind a proprietary wall, we have to open that data up to the light of science; and Dr. Pennebaker from UT-Austin talked about changing the way students think (I believe he was getting at metacognition), not just change their knowledge. Check out this organization.

Several speakers were talking around the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) without actually using the term. That was an interesting omission during day 1: no one I saw said SoTL explicitly, but lots of presenters talked about collecting data and assessment. Is SoTL a dirty word here, or passe?

The Subtle Psychology of Motivation and Learning

This was a real research team doing SoTL (although they didn't call it that). They reported on their efforts to improve the outcomes of both junior-high and community-college students. Their approach was impressively broad, including individual (growth mindset, persistence) and social factors (peer ties, faculty support). They have published their research in leading journals (Journal of Educational Psychology) and worked with edtech start-ups like Analytics for Learning.

I was pleased to hear that retrieval practice and interleaving were part of their intervention. 

There was more, much more. But this is tl;dr already, and I plan to blog at the close of every day of the conference. So if you want more from SXSWedu, stay tuned.