SXSWedu day 2

Day 2 has come and gone, and I have to say that I'm exhausted. Today was another very full day, with more

walking than day 1. Plus I visited the hotel gym this morning -- perhaps not a good idea. Oh well.

I'll follow the same format as Day 1's blog: general comments followed by notes from individual sessions.

General comments

I'm starting to see the excellent organization of this conference. There are SXSWedu volunteers all over, all eager to answer questions about locations of venues and anything else. The sessions start and finish on time, the tech is nearly invisible (a good thing), and the app is very functional. The wifi coverage is excellent across all venues.

Designing and Sustaining Transformative PD

 

I was really excited for this session. The description made it sound like it would align with the efforts of a committee I'm on at my institution to create a system for professional development on-demand. We certainly want the PD to be transformative. The room was beyond standing room only; I was nearly pushed out by the SXSWedu staff. I had to sit on the floor (not good for the post-gym aches). The description did not clearly state that the intended audience was K12 teachers, but in retrospect I should have surmised that by the offer of CPE credits. The presenters and most of the audience were indeed K12 teachers and administrators. Somewhat worse, and I have mixed feelings about saying this, the presenters set up the session as a 'workshop', meaning that they wanted the audience to interact and do much of the work. As I was not at a table that was difficult, even had I been inclined to participate. Which I wasn't. Plus, it was a 2-hour session. I left after 1 hour for a session I didn't think I would get to, but looked good... The presenters did talk about iTunes U, and I was able to find some interesting resources on that platform during the session. So, not a total loss.

How Universities are Crowdsourcing Innovations

This was a panel discussion between a reporter and three university Presidents (UKansas, Georgia State, Arizona State), all of which are members of the University Innovation Alliance, which I mentioned in my Day 1 blog. They do have some impressive outcomes in terms of raising the retention and graduation rates of poor and minority students. Given the student body and service region of my university (some of the poorest counties in the U.S.) this effort should be made known to the relevant administrators. I did tweet at my university president about UIA; he was not aware but wanted more info. I would love to follow up with him. If Georgia State and UAz can improve, we can too.

ImagineCon: The Future of Student Success

This was less a session than a fair for organizations that won a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last year.

Readers of this blog (shout out to my mother and a few others) will recall that I've been working with publishing companies to inform my Dept. colleagues about their online resources, especially their adaptive and personalized learning platforms. And I've been impressed by most of them. But I learned at this session that there are lots of non-profit organizations that are trying to do the same thing but with open-access content, reducing the cost to the student all the way down to $10 - $25, much less than the ~$100 cost from the publishing companies. Some of these

organizations include lumen, Open Learning Initiative, and more. Most of these companies have materials for Introduction to Psychology, or it's in their pipeline. I hope my Dept. will consider these resources when we next adopt a text for that class.

From South L.A. to the Ivy League

I hadn't planned on attending this session, but I had a few minutes between other sessions so I dropped in. As you might deduce from the title, this was a panel of two students and one of their teachers from L.A. The students are now attending Harvard and Yale, but came from an impoverished area of L.A., although they somehow attended a charter school. To be clear, these two young men were about as impressive as could be, still grounded and focused. Inspiring. Both mentioned individual teachers in the charter school as keys to their current Ivy League status. A nice boost for every teacher that aims to make a difference.

Evolve or Die: Why Education Has to Change

I was attracted to this session because I believe its title is true. The presenter, Jim Deters, started by making the (now) commonly understood points that the jobs of the future do not exist now, that future workers will change jobs (and careers) more than in the past, and that higher education has to change to respond to this new landscape. His focus is on coding and data skills; he made the point that many large companies that we do not associate with software (Goldman Sachs, G.E.) are now employing large numbers of coders. He's an entrepreneur, and the session quickly took on the feel of a sales pitch. Eventually one of the questions from the audience was about the cost of their training (~$21,000 for a 6-month course); he did try to make the point that some help with tuition was possible. His model may become more frequent but I'm not sure I buy that it will supplant traditional higher ed. What is the role of the liberal arts in his model? Not mentioned, even in passing.

That's a wrap for day 2. Another full day tomorrow. Whew.