SXSWedu day 3

It was another full day at SXSWedu. The focus of the sessions I attended today was different than the days before, not purposely on my part or the conference organizers'. Just worked out that way. No general comments today; on to the sessions.

How to Think (and Learn) Like a Futurist

Today's keynote was one of the most thought-provoking of the conference so far. Jane McGonigal is best known as the author of Reality is

Broken, an influential book about using games for good. She now works for something called Institute for the Future,

and she described her as a futurist. She clarified the meaning of that term as not someone who predicts the future, but rather someone who imagines the future and then tries to make that future more likely (if that imagining is desirable), or less likely (if undesirable). Her main insight was to imagine the future of education as analogous to Bitcoin.

Bitcoins are traded between individuals with a complete record of each transaction available to everyone. So her imagining is that education could be traded between individuals about any topic, and that each transaction would be recorded in the Ledger. It's an interesting idea in that it would make everyone a teacher and a learner, and that these transactions could be monetized. But even if not worth real currency, there could be badging, and the barter system would thrive. You can learn more about the idea here. 

From Analytics to Action

This session focused on the topic of the day for me: data analytics. There was a panel discussion about how to best to use data about student progress to change what universities do to improve outcomes like retention and graduation. I liked the proscription from one of the panelists: 1. Give faculty data that is really useful, 2. Convince faculty that they have an ethical responsibility to act on this data, 3. Tell faculty what specific things they can do to help, and 4. Show faculty that their actions are having positive effects. One of the panelists, Phillip Long, has a telling title: Associate Vice Provost for Learning Science at UT Austin. They clearly believe in the value of using data analytics. This session made me believe that I need to have a progress check in my online courses early on in the 8-week term, perhaps as early as the end of the second week. I need to look at the grades from previous semesters to see if I can identify predictive events that early in the term.

InnovationU: Unlocking the University-as-Incubator

The panel for this session included Bridget Burns from The University Innovation Alliance (they were everywhere at SXSWedu). The other three panelists were either academics with experience spinning off innovations into private enterprises or setting up incubators (or accelerators). Much was said about the barriers in the academy to these efforts, even at the R1 institutions where these people worked. They pointed out that edtech (as opposed to biotech, for example) is often not thought of as intellectual property because it is most often used to further the educational mission of the university. But it is IP as much as some new drug or device and deserves both support and protection from universities.

Personalized Learning: Campus Leadership Insights

Personalized learning is one of the major themes of this conference. There were numerous sessions about it, some sponsored by publishing companies, some sponsored by non-profits doing it the open-access way, and some organized by academics. This session was a hybrid as it had three academics talking about their experiences instituting personalized learning systems on their campus, and a provider of such service, OpenStax.

Personalized learning means that students interact online with assessments that provide both for mastery of the content, and guidance about what they need to study more. This session was not about the what of personalized learning, but the how of adopting personalized learning. So the panelists talked about how to get faculty to buy in to this new approach (hint: pay them to do so), and the barriers to adoption from an institutional and individual perspective. This made me think that we are asking the wrong questions when we choose to adopt a new book for classes like Introduction to Psychology. Instead of asking the reps about resources, price to students, and quality of the content, we should be asking them for evidence of the effectiveness of their book in terms of learning and persistence. I hope that changes.

Social Media: Legal Pitfalls and best Practices

This was the odd session out for me today. I do have an interest in using social media in education so I thought I'd see what these two people had to say. They were a former teacher who now consults with school districts about edtech, and a lawyer who focuses on social media in education. They focused mostly on K12 so it was less relevant to me. Suffice to say that this is very sticky wicket, and there are few clear, hard lines to be found. Students can get into trouble discussion education-related issues both on an off campus, and the same goes for instructors. Be careful on social media, be very careful.

Coda

Something I forgot to mention from Day 2 was my visit to the Canvas lounge. We are in the process of evaluating several learning management systems at my institution, including Canvas, so I was curious about what they would offer at SXSWedu. Of course they had loads of Canvas employees there to answer questions and plenty of swag. But I saw on their daily schedule that they were going to have a session about professional development. That caught my eye because I'm on a committee designing a professional development on-demand system that we intend to put on our LMS. So, I find out that there are already people doing that on Canvas. Interesting.

Tomorrow is the final day of the conference. I'll be sorry to see it end.