Campus Technology '08 Conference

Last week I attended the Campus Technology conference in Boston. The focus of the conference was on Web 2.0. I learned about some new tools, methods of supporting faculty, and saw lots of great tools at the trade show.

The ideas and practices that have stuck with me the most are:

• e-mail is not the preferred method of communication for young people (our current and future students). They spend their time texting, instant messaging, and in Facebook. If we want to reach them, we will have to explore these arenas.
• Washington State University uses Sharepoint for students' e-portfolios
• SecondLife (a virtual world) is growing as a tool for education and business
• SecondLife could be a great tool for education, but it demands good hardware and an experienced instructor.
• Mashups are very exciting. But if I don't understand how to create one, we're not there yet. Some sites like Popfly claim to make them easy. Um.... ok....
• Web 3.0 will be the "semantic web"
  

Several of the presenters I saw had excellent ideas and resources.

• Sarah "Intelligirl" Robbins gave a very interesting and helpful presentation on the benefits and difficulties of using Second Life in higher education. She has a blog at http://ubernoggin.com/
• Bethany Bovard does great things in her course for community-building and communication with free Web 2.0 tools in a very pedagogically sound manner
• Adrian Sannier, Chief Technology Officer at ASU, delivered an excellent and motivating keynote speech.