I co-presented at a conference yesterday. With professor MF, the prof I've been working with for the last year or so on her online class. Longtime readers of this journal recall the process I've gone through with MF to get the course up and running. If you go back to the archives for August, September... you can read all about our last minute insanities and our initial launch of CuSeeMe for the class. Great adventures, good stories...
We put together a nice powerpoint presentation. MF submitted proposals, white papers and all kinds of crap to EDUCAUSE and NERCOMP. We came up with a catchy name for the presentation... by stealing Verizon's wireless commercial tagline. We submitted the papers and were accepted, and we went and presented our wonderful story as: " "Can you hear me now? Good!" Designing an online course using Blackboard and Webcams."
The conference for NERCOMP was held in Worcester. It's a New England regional sub-conference for EDUCAUSE, which will be held this November in California. I went to EDUCAUSE in 1999 as an attendee. I've never presented at a big fancypants schmarty computing conference.
MF knew nothing about the types of attendees at EDUCAUSE conferences, and when we got there she looked through the other presentations and said "Most of these are about IT stuff and back end development, not actual TEACHING using technology." She was right -- helpdesk symposiums, IT infrastructure... that kind of stuff is big. The fact they accepted us and put us in shocked me at first, and now she understood why.
Then she noticed we were in the last time slot on the last day of the conference. It was 50 degrees and sunny out. After this longassed winter, would YOU go sit in our presentation? If I were me, I'd be out exploring hiking trails in Worcester county.
We got there at 11am and registered and picked what presentations we wanted to see.
The first was on a portal built by the Sloan School of Management at MIT. It was sort of dull, and while I'm sure they're proud of it ... to me it's just another portal. And it wasn't very visually appealling. As a user, I'd be snoring.
After that presentation, MF was suddenly very nervous about our presentation. She kept leaning over and saying "We don't have enough to talk about... our slides don't look that good compared to this." I kept telling her to shut UP! And we'd laugh.
I was firmly confident that between the two of us we could talk for an hour. I liked our slides until someone academic told her she needed pictures on each slide and they needed to DO something (action feature in powerpoint). It was all I could do a week ago to stop her from putting a different colored background on each damn slide, and a crazy flying picture with the zoom sound on it. Jebus! I settled her down after that and we had lunch with some cool people from Gettysburg College. They were leaving right after lunch, so we told them about our presentation and they said they would LOVE to stay for it but they had to hit the road in order to get past NYC at a decent hour... someone else at the table from Boston College opened up her guide and decided that she would blow off the one she'd initially chosen and read our synopsis "God that sounds funny!" she said, and put a star next to us. She was there when we presented...
The presentation we went to after lunch was done by the Drexel University Learning Management team leaders. One was a former faculty member, and he talked about using WebCT at Drexel and how they've grown the online course presentations there since 1999. He left academia and went over to the IT group. When I interviewed for a position as a designer at my former college recently, this is the kind of guy the college was looking for. I would have loved to work for him. After his presentation he was swampped with people coming up to him, and I wanted to go say hi, but I didn't.
Philadelphia is too long a commute.
The third presentation we attended only had six people in it. It was by the folks at James Madison University, and they talked about how a 99% residential college was handling the concept of online education. They'd decided a couple years ago that they didn't need online courses. The faculty often just put up personal websites and some additional augmentation for their coursework, but no one cyber-commutes at their school.
So they do it during the summer. Students can take a couple online courses during the summer months in the core program for writing. This coming year they are expanding it to include other core courses. So if you go home for the summer to NJ, you can take a class and stay ahead or on top of the game. Nice.
Then, it was our turn. MF was quaking. "No one is going to come to this... everyone's going to leave early..." I told her if five people came, that was good because we'd know exactly how long our presentation goes, what needs added, what should get dropped... I personally considered this our "dry run."
"If ten people show up I'll die. I'll consider my cup runneth over," MF said to me as I set up the laptop.
Five people, then ten. Then 15. Then a batch of another 10. There were close to 30 people in there. Hallelujah. An audience. I asked them why they were there on such a beautiful day and one person motioned to fake leave the room and we laughed. I thanked them heartily for coming.
We ran out of time before we ran out of content. MF and I can blather on and on. The powerpoint presentation was awesome. We had a video clip to show them how the course worked on screen, and they were fascinated. I shared stories about the sudden appearance of male genitalia in the class. We got lots of good laughs. I think that people really liked what we had to say.
It was awesome.
I was nervous for a few minutes yesterday morning. By the time I got there with MF I realized I couldn't be the nervous one... I had to be the queen of confidence and the Rock of Gibraltar. I was. She was. We did great.
Now she wants to go to another conference in Myrtle Beach in June. The presentation date and time are on Jessica's birthday. I told her that I didn't intend on missing my daughter's birthday for a conference. She thought that was odd. (?? wha?). Her kids are grown up all the way -- one is in college and the other just got accepted to Sloan for his MBA. I looked at her and laughed... would you miss your kid's 11th birthday? She understood. A 22nd birthday maybe not. But. I don't intend to ever be away from home for either of my kids' birthdays while they live under my roof. She's looking into having it switched to the 10th or 9th if she can.
She wants us to drive down, and the only cost we'd have is a hotel room, which we could swing easily.
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