News Story

ECAR Symposium 2007, Boca Raton Florida

Peter Scott, Monday 7 Jan 2008

The Educause ECAR Symposium was held in the spectacular Boca Raton Resort & Club near Miami in Florida this year. The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) provides timely research and analysis to help higher education leaders make better decisions about information technology. ECAR assembles leading scholars, practitioners, researchers, and analysts to focus on issues of critical importance to higher education, many of which carry increasingly complicated and consequential implications. ECAR provides educational leaders with high-quality, well-researched, timely information to support institutional decision-making.

On Thursday, December 06, 2007 I gave an invited presentation to ECAR meeting on Knowledge Media for Live and Online Open Learning. "Students can now interact online with learning content and working materials provided openly on the Internet that are not clearly tied either to their working organization or to their programs of study. Some institutions are even giving away materials in a rich open learning framework. The more sophisticated open and participatory learning infrastructures also aim to provide elements of social networking, presence, and synchronous systems to enable students to have rich online interactions with an international group of peers and mentors. We are starting to glimpse what this might mean for conventional education. At the very least, it is raising the bar for us all and providing some exciting new partnership opportunities."

Naturally, I demonstrated a set of live systems – with some huge successes and huge failures to give the assembled ECAR delegates a feel for innovation, KMI style. The agenda was stimulating, the participants were diverse and highly engaged (and the venue, stunning) – altogether an excellent event!

Kudos to Ron Yanosky and Richard Katz! Their vision of applied research is an excellent match with our own… looking forward to future work together…