A quick report on the first day of the UCISA Corporate Information Systems Group conference from rainy Southampton – I originally came from Hampshire, but haven’t been into Southampton for nearly 20 years - still followed the football team though (many a happy rainy evening was spent at the Dell watching Channon, Keegan ,Shilton and so on during the Saints glory period on the late 70s).
I haven’t been to this conference before, but thought it worth attending, as we’ve a range of CIS projects underway – timetabling, CRM, various task improvement groups etc. Wasn’t really sure what to expect, but as you might guess, it’s a very different audience from Networkshop - the last conference I went to (more suites, no jeans!).
The first thing to note is how it’s the first conference that I’ve been to that’s really made use of Web 2.0 technology (apart the Institutional Web Management Workshop obviously, which should be pioneering these sorts of things). A Facebook group for the conference was set up and publicised in advance, and discussion topics for each speaker were pre-posted. Delegates were encouraged to post questions to the speakers onto Facebook, and then these were then asked at then end. - this worked very well, and I can see become a standard approach for future events.
A bit about the first presentation:
Mark Milliron (described in the program as an ‘award winning education leader’) opened with an energetic presentation entitled "
Learning and the road ahead". I won’t attempt to summarise the presentations – the slides are available, but here are a few points that stuck in my mind:
• Could we have a learning system that worked like iTunes (great idea, I love iTunes),
• Gaming is increasing important – it’s displacing TV, bringing together generations, and no longer the preserve of kids (average age of gamer now 33)
• Velocity of data is important – credit card companies can spot unusual purcase behaviour in hours, Amazon can recommend a book based on a purchased in a second. Universities typically take months to utilize their data.
• Can we use data for predictive marketing (like Amazon), predicting where students need extra support (retention), or recreate customized learning objects?
• CAVE people – colleagues against virtually everything... haven't heard that one before.
More about other presentations in future postings...