Wednesday

• The Unique Human Brain: Clues from Neurology
• Exhibits (talked to Zimbra & Google)
• Lessons Learned from Deploying Sakai: An Interinstitutional Panel Discussion
• Leadership and Management Lightning Round for:
  • Library/IT Partnership: The View from the Dean’s Office
  • What Does a Web Enterprise Services Strategy Entail?
• Student E-Mail: New Options, New Solutions (the session of the singing loon)
• Poster Sessions for:
  • Library/IT Partnerships: A View from the Dean’s Office
  • A Combined Math and Rhetoric Lab Course: A Pilot Program
  • What’s Not in Your Wiki?
• Informal Learning Space presentation by MIT on their mobile device/iPhone application
• NITLE reception

Thursday

• Discussion Session: Outsourcing E-Mail
• The Facts of Life in a High-Tech Age (Moira Gunn)
• Discussion Session: Outsourcing Non-E-Mail Applications
• Lunch/Networking with Tweeps (Missed ELI Top Teaching & Learning Challenges of 2009 – bummer!)
• Exhibits (talked with Microsoft and Desire2Learn, got roped into talking with Bradford, got bag thrust at me by … some vendor I don’t even know. I took it.)
• Point/Counterpoint: Student Email: In or Out?
• Poster Sessions for:
  • Visit, Upload, and Share! Collaboration Through Web 2.0 Tools in an International Experience Class
  • Beyond Talking Heads: Creating a Web Video Channel
  • Altiris and Hardware Independent Imaging
  • Looking for IT Answers? Browse Our Service Catalogue

Friday

• Meant to go to Disconnects Between Learning Management Systems and Millennial Generation User Expectations but I ran into a former colleague and we networked for a while…
• UC Mobile (University of Cincinnati’s mobile phone offering)
• Should have gone to the closing session on Why IT Matters: A President’s Perspective on Technology and Leadership but I wanted to get to the airport with plenty of time for security, which ended up taking 5 minutes max. Twitter livefeed of the session indicates it was fantastic and dynamic. Grrrrrr….

A bunch of other sessions looked really good too, but I missed them for one reason or another.

• In and Outsourcing: Benefits and Risks
• Social Media and Education: The Conflict Between Technology and Institutional Education, and the Future
• The World War II Poster Project: Building Information Literacy Through Collaboration
• Mashups, Remixes, and Video Culture: Engaging the YouTube Generation in the Classroom
• The Launch of Google Apps for Education at USC: Determinants, Decisions, and Deterrents
• A Campus-Wide Approach for Mobile Learning with iPhones
• Tomorrow’s Students, Today’s K–12 Digital Learners: Are You Ready for Them?
• Faculty Use of Digital Resources and the Implications for Digital Libraries

I went to two morning discussions sessions: one on outsourcing student email, the other on outsourcing non-email applications. Took lots of notes in both. I went to afternoon session: a point/counterpoint on outsourcing student email solutions. I talked with the Microsoft Live@edu rep about email. I walked past the Mirapoint booth several times but was too fried each time to actually make it in to talk with them.

I also got roped into two presentations: the first was by a company named Bradford. They do network security stuff. It’s probably bad to admit that I only stuck around for the drawing for an ipod touch at the end, isn’t it? About 20 minutes after I didn’t win that prize, I stumbled on a customer presentation about Desire2Learn. It was really good, so after it was over I grabbed one of the reps and chatted with him for a long time about D2L. It’s a pretty impressive-looking product.

Poster sessions today were similar to yesterday in terms of graphical quality. I just don’t get the whole using 8.5″ x 11″ paper plus thumbtacks for a presentation. Not surprisingly, Memorial Sloan Kettering had the most professional poster. Scientists do a lot of poster sessions, so they get how to do them right.

As for Twitter, I tweeted the Moira Gunn keynote this morning and noticed that 8 or so other folks were doing the same thing. A few of us ended up grabbing lunch together. It was odd to walk up to a table of people and say, “Hi! I’m librarygrrrl, but you can call me Megan.” Fortunately they were all like, “Hi, I’m Kaijia” and “I’m LJ Full of Grace”, so librarygrrrl doesn’t seem quite so silly.

I’ll post links to all the sessions I attended later. Too poped right now to do more than close the computer and crawl under the covers of this big, king bed bedecked in all-white sheets and duvet. Yeah, that pretty much would never happen in my home with the two pooches, their fur, and their dity little paws.

(ETA this whole paragraph which I cannot believe I forgot. Long day much?)

The opening session speaker today was V.S. Ramachandran (official bio), a neurologist who talked about phantom limb pain and synesthesia. He’s a brilliant man and amazingly funny. He gave a TED talk last year, which was somewhat similar to today’s lecture.

After that great start-off, I struggled with session selection. The first couple I went to were on learning management systems, and we are so not at a place where anything the speakers were saying made sense to me. So instead I went and talked extensively with a few vendors about some of their products. Color me impressed with the second person I talked to at the Zimbra booth – he knew his stuff. The Google fellow was okay, but not as edgy or as hungry as the Zimbra people. That’s the problem with being the big guy – you don’t always know when someone is coming up from behind you, trying to knock you off your pedastel. Not that I think Zimbra will knock Google off of the bulk of their pedastels, but they do have some really compelling things about their product that I think many schools will find very attractive (*cough*integration with voice messaging*cough*). Spent some time talking with the Sharepoint LMS fellows too. It might just be me, but Sharepoint just doesn’t make sense to me yet. Perhaps it’s not having seen it used in any sort of situation… seems that it might be the issue.

The one session I went to today that really resonated with me was a session on student email and different ways of approaching it. There were large, medium, and small schools there (yay small schools!) and they took several approaches, from keeping it in-house to pushing it to the cloud via Google/Microsoft to using an open-source front-end to using a hosted open-source solution for everyone. The best moment of that session, though, had to be when the woman sitting next to me was working on her computer, which started in with a (very loud) loon wail that morphed into a yodel. (Note: those links are both to .au files, so don’t be that person who plays them in a conference session now, y’all.) Now I’m all about loon calls, having grown up on a lake in northern Minnesota with maybe a dozen mating pairs of loons. But in the middle of a session at Educause on student email solutions? It was hilarious, and the speaker handled it really well. Poor woman was embarrassed, as she should have been, but it definitely lightened the mood in the room.

I ran into several folks today who I wasn’t sure were coming: Mark C. and Janet S. from Bryn Mawr, Anne M. and Veronica B. from Wellesley (well, I knew they were coming, but still), and then I even met someone who worked at the University of Northern Iowa! We didn’t know each other when I was there, but he seemed like a nice guy and like he enjoys working there, so props to him. Still waiting to run into Pattie; reports are that she’s around.

The final thing I did today was go to the NITLE reception. I knew one person walking in there, and ended up meeting several other. That, of course, was the point. I enjoyed talking with John from Drake, Bryan Alexander, and Pamela from Occidental. Made a bit of a fool of myself with someone else, doing the whole, “I know you but I don’t know quite why I know you” spiel. Later it occured to me that he’s a former president of a national library association and his face was all over stuff several years ago. D’oh!

Tomorrow morning starts early, so I’m headed to bed now. Go Phillies, World Series 2008 Champions!