Learning Innovation

The 2012 EDUCAUSE Exhibit Hall (the vendor floor) features 270 edtech companies. From Aastra (booth #669/671 - audio and video conferencing, business continuity, disaster recovery, emergency planning, cloud computing and services, enterprise information systems, wireless) to Xirrus (booth #627/691 - hardware, identity and access management, network infrastructure, network security and applications, wireless) - with anyone and everyone in the edtech space (except Apple) in between.

What are your goals for EDUCAUSE 2012? What do you hope to learn at the conference? What insights and information do you hope to take back to your campus?

If you are reading Nate Silver's awesome book The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't you know that: a) The track record of forecasters for predicting future events is abysmal. b) There is no correlation (and indeed an inverse correlation) between the confidence that one makes predictions and the accuracy of these prognostications.

If I could choose one theme that I hope resonates with EDUCAUSE attendees this year it would be around productivity.

Are you going to EDUCAUSE in Denver the week of 11/5? If you are an "IT Decision Maker" on your campus, someone who decides what your institution or school or even department purchases, then there will be many folks at EDUCAUSE that will want to meet you. How do you choose which vendors to meet?

Instructure announced today that it’s launching a new service called Canvas Network. The service is being positioned as an alternative to existing MOOC vendors or platforms (such as Coursera or EdX) to allow schools to teach open online courses on the Canvas platform.

I'm betting that there is a strong overlap between our IHE community and fans of Steven Johnson. If you are like me you got hooked on Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, and have loved his subsequent books (like The Ghost Map, The Invention of Air, and Where Good Ideas Come From).

Are any of you planning to buy Microsoft's new Surface tablet? Which model interests you more, the Surface with Windows RT or the Surface with Windows 8 Pro?