EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting 2013

Product Owner Julie Rudder (Northwestern University) presented a poster at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting held in Denver, Colorado, from February 4-6.  You can view the poster here via the Avalon Media System Slideshare account. When Julie returned from Denver, I asked her a few questions about her trip.

Can you talk a bit about the focus of this year's ELI Annual?

It was structured like many other conferences: centered around themes of teaching and learning are keynote speakers, multiple tracks with presentations, poster sessions, interactive sessions. This year's themes included emerging technology, future modeling, and academic transformation; mobile learning; methods for evaluating technology-based instructional innovations; online and blended teaching and learning; e-textbooks; and learning analytics.

Did you leave the conference with any new ideas about Avalon?

There was a lot of interest in Avalon that came from folks who did not work in libraries but in units that dealt with streaming media - lots of folks were interested in clip making and playlists.  People were asking how Avalon was different from other systems out there. Many wanted to know how Avalon would work with other types of systems they already have at their universities, confirming some of our own thoughts about the kind of interoperability the system should have. I also had some conversations about structural metadata - the term was confusing and a little too library for this crowd but the concept made sense and people seemed excited about its function.

What was your favorite part of the trip?

I was able to hear an update on a research project I've been following. The talk was called "Student Use of Digital Resources: Implications for Learning and Technology Support," given by a team of researchers from the University of Central Florida, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Wisconsin-Madison.