Back from Educause - general impressions
I have finally managed to find some time to sit down and digest everything I saw at Educause. All in all it was a very interesting conference, although, as so often is the case, the most interesting things were discussed outside of sessions.
First of all I would like to thank my fellow 'Edutrippers' for all
their contributions, it should be a good basis for my report.
Before I get that written down there are a number of things I can mention already. This year there was not a new big hype. A small hype appeared to be recording lectures and offering these in a streaming format and of course as a podcast. Open Source was not the hype it was last year. On the other hand, there were a few sessions on switching VLE (or CMS if you are from that side of the pond). They was unease about the Blackboard patent, but more about that later. Open source seems to be a quiet flow underneath. The question will be if large numbers of institutions will adopt it in time.
I was surprised to find the traditional style of teaching at American universities. The coming of a net-generation is starting to get institutions thinking about a new pedagogy. A lot of people in the Netherlands have already been using aspects of this new pedagogy for a while: student centred learning, group based learning, coupling real life problems to learning, etc. I am not sure how representative the pictures portrayed at Educause were, but if this is the case I can better understand why certain tools (group tools for instance) are so underdeveloped in many VLEs.