Blogging at the League for Innovation conference got a wee more difficult as the Wi-Fi went AWOL, 404. The word is even the wired network here in the Midways Airport Convention center due to a blaster type worm banging out of a machine in the exhibit area. Last I saw, the techies were yanking machines off the net one by one to find the offender.

It could not be my computer ;-)

So here, post sessions is a quick recap….

There seems to be much fewer attendees than I recall from years past. The economy nose dive has hit community colleges hard, so it is not surprising travel money has cut back conference attendance.

Our monring session on our Learning Grants program went fine, for the 9 people there (and 3 were from our own system). Oh well, the show goes on, and the presentations we do always live a longer shelf life than a one shot powerpoint as they are always online (and not behind a freaking password).

I later caught my colleagues from GateWay Community College as they presented their process for doing a locally produced DVD, “Digital Movies: I did it My Way”. It is actually a nifty project- a theater teacher had his students do the acting to produce an instructional video for a faculty member in the Physical Therapy program, so both programs benefitted. An 8 minute video took many many more person-hours in planning, filming, and of course, editing. But it was more than worth it to them for get a video they could not purchase for an precise purpose, and the experience they gained from doing a full start to finisg DV production.

Then it was a mid-afternoon session, “Virtual Colloquia to Solve Real Problems: The Case of Sustainable Development” from Kingsborough Community College, in Brookyln, New York. Now I felt bad for these guys- I was the audience. A personal presentation! And it was fascinating. They had developed a complex case study for a difficult problem- a real case concerning economic development and environmental impact of the Punta Cana Beach Resort in the Dominican Republic. Teams of students from 6 community colleges in New York, North Carolina, and California each had to play the roles of various stakeholders in a real-time video conference, and then each team had two hours to develop and present a position statement that took in consideration all of the other stakeholders. It is an interesting approach because there are no “right” answers to the carefully constructed case study, and illustrates the depth of complex problem solving.

More is avalable from the Institute for Virtual Enterprise:

After that was the typical stroll through the exhibit area, I have not interest in the trinkets and gimmicks, but did talk to some people with some interesting products for eportfolios. Saw an interesting app called OpenMind from MatchWare that allows you to create mind maps, or visual maps of information/processes with attached media, etc, all drag and drop. It exports to nicely formatted Word documents as well as Flash versions for the web. What I like is how it can be used as a planning design tool where you first develop a project as a graphical concept map. This is definitely a tool to get some people leaning on the right side of their braiins.

The “opening keynote” was a painful experience. There were two rounds of welcomes with people reading their comments off of crib sheets, and then an insulting commercial masquerading as a “speech” from a sales hack from T-Mobile. It was billed as the “implications of wireless technology for community colleges” but it was really a thnly veiled and poorly delivered sales pitch. The guy did not even know his audience. As Opus would say, Pffffffffftttt.

Whew! Full day.

The capping was an over-the-top dinner with a group of other educators at Weissgerber’s Third Street Pier, a rather fancy restaurant right on the Milwaukee River. It was a few hours of funny stories and obnoxious laughter.

Tomorrow- Lather, Rinse but no repeat. Tonight was a few hours making sure I could run the MLX locally from my laptop if the net was still out tomorrow (having Unix, mySQL, Apache under the OSX hood of my G4 laptop is an un-matched resource).

The League Bloggin’: The Rest of Day 1 by CogDogBlog, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Okay, first session at the League for Innovation conference, this one from Wisconsin Indianhead Technical College titled “Weaving Critical Thnking into Online Courses”.

Okay, we wade through the cheeese-head jokes, a lot of background on WITC, their mission, their learning acadamies… still waiting 30 minutes in to get to the Critical Thinking.

The college does have a plan for every course to have online ‘component’ by 2006 (current system in Blackboard).

Developed a critical thinking curriculum through their Facilitating the Future Gathering, an online course for faculty.

Oh, apparently all the content is inside Blackboard, so nothing the world at large can benefit from. Damn CMS padlocked silos.

Used discussion board to start with introduction activities but lead to a group definition of critical thinking.

“Best Practices”:
* Some classes have set up discussion boards where to get credit, posts had to be 150 words minimum.”
* requires students log in 4 times per week (monitor user activity logs)

Next sessions look good– oh that is right, because one is mine ;-)

The League Bloggin’: “Weaving Critical Thinking…” by CogDogBlog, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.