AUC report
AUC Conference
Royal Pines, Gold Coast. 2007.
Monday 24th September. The first keynote speaker was Tony King who is Apple's managing director in Australia. Tony spoke about Apple’s future vision for Apple Oz and mentioned the following two things that have relevance to CQU.
- Apple are negotiating with various Telcos in an effort to improve broadband quality and coverage for university staff and students specifically.
- Apple iTunes is soon going to interface with Facebook.
The second speaker was Kenneth Green who is the director of the campus computing project which is the largest continuing study of the role of information technology in American colleges and universities. The following points were of interest.
- He mentioned an academic paper which looks interesting. "Culture eats strategy every day".
- MIT open course ware could be an indicator of higher ed in the future.
Stephen Atherton from Apple Australia was next.
- NCRIS australia government web site.
- Austlit
- He made reference to the Omnium environment which begs further research.
- Universities are using google analytics to find other universities that are visiting their sites and creating partnerships of common practice.
- The Leopard wiki server is based on SVN and features tiered administration. Looks pretty good.
- Podcast producer on Leopard has some features for quick content creation and ease of administration that CQU should investigate.
Paul Draper's presentation was titled "Contribute, Communicate, Collaborate. The internet as a workplace in the digital arts".
- He showed a good video on Web2.0 titled from youtube titled "Day of the Long Tail".
- He referenced a book that looked interesting titled "Economics of attention". <-- investigate.
- He spoke briefly about a sourceforge software package they use at griffith called MRBS which is a resource booking package.
- Paul is in charge of the Griffith SmartArts project.
Tuesday 25th September. The first presenter was Michael Ossipoff from Telstra who fielded some awkward questions from the audience following his presentation :)
- He spoke about timeshifting which is the blurring of the lines between work and home. Of course the usual Telstra plugs were present.
- Generational definitions is the concept that if an invention of a product occurs before your birth you dont see it as special. ie gen x,y digital natives etc.
- He quote some interesting stats by the ABS. Australian social trends about Broadband takeup.
David Hood from Otago University, NZ spoke about the simple way to broadcast images to low bandwidth recipients using the Mac screencapture commandline tool and the built in web server. This solution is for screen casting to small audiences and doesn't scale at all well.
Kate Foy from USQ gave a presentation about Twitter, Podcasting, Blogging and Mashups that was a basic introduction but mentioned the importance of a couple of things that CDDU have previously spoken about. The need for interface and API standardization in Web 2.0 Applications and the importance of engaging with people who are likely to be innovators or early adopters of technology in order to gain data about new technology effectiveness.
James Steele from the University of Canberra spoke about hardware and software for highend professional video applications in tertiary teaching.
- A book which is a must have by Ed Kovalick titled "Video Systems in an IT Environment". published by Burlington/Focal Press.
- iMovie 8 supports HDV. This has implications to the DTLS video production unit.
- Dinky software for the autocue in VPU. http://www.movieclip.biz/prompt.html. Enables the use of the Autocue by a mac.
Wednesday 26th September
Carl Berger who is a Dean at the University of Michigan gave a talk on millennial students and millennial instructors and how each generation accepts and uses technology.
- The power point used in his presentation can be found here.
- The digital natives ( who aren't necessarily categorized by age ) are a mile wide and an inch deep when talking about technological aptitude. This means they accept a lot of technologies but only at a shallow level.
- The Umich CARAT group
- Digital natives display Cognitive Dissonance meaning they can successfully multitask as long as the tasks are quite different. For example they can work on the computer and watch television at the same time but not watch a movie on the computer and television.
- Digital natives information gathering strategy is WINWINI or what I need when I need it.
- As it was an Apple hosted event he explained some of the benefits of the Apple learning interchange.
Summary.
- One interesting statistic that was quoted at the conference is that University Staff and Students are buying more Macs than the universities themselves. What's interesting is that Apple's sales to universities have actually increased and currently demand is far outstripping supply.
- In the course of the three days we had many informal conversations with colleagues from other universities. The interesting thing I found was with regard to teaching and learning these other Universities are in a similar position to CQU. How to fit Web2.0 into education? Many of the presenters at the conference spoke about Web 2.0 applications and the difficulties arising from trying to implement such applications into centralized infrastructures while others have very innovative and open minded IT departments who are working with academics to develop plans for the future. It's a big culture change from an IT governance perspective.
- Some items of interest to me personally resulted from some of these conversations.
- Podcast producer application has possibilities for CQU
- iMovie 8 support for HD video.
- Deakin University Power links. Developed by Blackboard for Deakin and it links Blackboard to other applications.
