E-Learning Consortium of Colorado Conference

 Keynoter: Rovy Branon from ADL Co-Lab

Hi All,

I attended the ELCC Conference on April 14 - 16 in Vail with several CMC colleagues: Daryl Yarrow, Susan Herman, Gabe Aguilar, Suzanne Thompson, Kathy-Kiser Miller,our Emeritus Peter J, and Louis Beatty (one of the two elite technoraties with an Ipad). This remains my favorite Rocky Mountain conference because it is by and for two and four-year colleagues for peer-teaching sessions by both the tech support and instructional side of the house.

Our own college was active in those contributions. Susan and Kathy gave a great session Friday morning on the the use of Voicethread to create a faculty tutorial and for use by learners in two of Kathy's classes.

One inviting aspect of this conference is that it is a safety net for presenting teaching and learning technologies in progress. Hotel networks are notorious for their lack of dependability, especially with hands-on lab sesssions. Kathy, Suzanne, and I were involved in two presentations in Second Life that had big challenges, but the celebration of poetry month in Second Life out did the challenges. We had readers both in-world and from the conference lab.

Thank you, Margaret Maxwell, for reading your wonderful work from Aspen in-world. Thank you, Kathy Kizer-Miller for bringing Lindsey Royce's work to the world, and thank you Suzanne for sharing your talent. As I tweeted that day at elcc#10: "The poets are reading. Good medicine :)."

And a little about the poetry event at Colorado EduIsland. The community colleges of Colorado have been meeting for about a year on this shared virtual space to determine policy, practice, appearance and events by single schools or across schools. Rhonda Dove (ProCo Clarity) is an extraordinary builder and has given a lion's share to helping the community come into practice. Cheryl Comstock (Ize Messmer) has given an enormous amount of time to leadership and communication. Kathy Kizer-Miller (Miranda Menjou) has been one or our invaluable participants as a faculty member who is has quite a bit of experience using Second Life as one aspect of classes she teaches. I have not included all steering committee members here, but this collaborative experience is a hopeful one, and we think we are just starting to see it taking off as another opportunity to meeting and learning across the miles.

The next celebration of poetry month is this week on Colorado EduIsland at 10 MDT on Wed. This group will be already attending a global online conference and the celebration is one of the sessions. Again, there will be scheduled poets and an open mic. Please let me know if you would like to be listed as a scheduled poet.

As a last note, I tend to listen to the keynoters at this conference to talk about the cutting edge. I came away with a couple concepts: Faculty Entrepreneurialism and "The University of One" and more talk about augmented reality and the use of phone to read compacted information in QR (scanner) codes through the phone cameras. I spent Saturday playing with the QR and wrote about it here With many students having camera phones, they could be used to construct a campus scavenger hunt :).

So there you have it, loved this conference. Stay tuned to more about it from our various attendees :).