Well, here I am at BbWorld '06. It's a lot like the "2005 Bb Users Conference". A lot of fluffy abstracts about eLearning given by academics and techies alike. It's a shame really.. how no one is both a techie and an academic.. except maybe that guy from MIT.. I think being even loosely affiliated with MIT makes you a techie.
So far, I don't have too much to complain about. A lot of what I've witnessed is not applicable. I know though that it'd be easy to put together some kind of presentation for this conference, though I don't know if it's the kind of place I'd want to. I'm more about the hardcore technology than the loose abstracty stuff.
I finally submitted my anthropology paper. I worked pretty hard on it, but the tedium of crawling through books looking for exactly where I discovered what I wrote about was causing the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up. I think my prof is really cool though.. I hope she'll be able to infer that I did the reading.
She is a lot like what most of the people here are touting as the "engaging, interactive, tech savvy" type of prof that education needs in this tough transition period. A good quote from one of the people on the panel I just witnessed was that e-Learning weeds out bad professors. If a student can have a technological leg up, or a teacher sloppily applies technology to a course, the result can be disasterous. We need more profs like her to help bridge the gap between students and professors.. technologists and academics..
It's crazy though because the very same teachers who are the most valuable also have the most unique and valuable curriculums. Those with only a loose affiliation with a university will be more cautious about their intellectual property than those that are full time faculty. We really need to address copyright and intellectual property issues to bring them into the fold, because they really are the most valuable aspect of higher education.
--_-