Opening Session

This post is from the Opening Session of CampusInsight 2008. The User Conference for Campus Management software. I freely admit that I am new to this blogging stuff and because of this fact, I took substantial liberties in editing content after the event.

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The Campus Management Insight 2008 conference opened with the presentation of a video about the college learners of today. Click Here for the video.

Cathy Snoddy then came up on the screen with her 2nd life avatar and introduced several of the new tools available via 2nd life. Can we, the Higher Education Community, teach using virtual worlds? What are the advantages of using these tools? How long will it take before we can get good at it?

Cathy then physically came up on stage and went into her presentation about the history and direction of education.

Education 0.0 - Teaching in the town square.

Education 1.0 - Some structure developed along with walls and building and SILOS where sage on the stage was the predominant model.

Education 2.0 - Introduction of distance learning. This is still largely a silo environment where only students and teachers are interacting. To prepare students for the real world we need to include/involve more external input.

But this does NOT mean Education 2.1 - No creepy Tree Houses. No silo environments.

Education 3.0 - Will we be ready for

• Blogs
• Wikis
• Mashups
• Virtual Worlds (There?)
• Ubiquitious Access using the students tool sets
  

Cathy's conclusion is that this is what students of tomorrow will demand.


The session then went into the parade of Campus Management Executives:

Mahendran Jawaharlal - Chief Operating Officer
• Thank yous for those who coordinated the conference
• New Records set for this conference

• 435+ people
• 140+ Institutions

• Next year's conference will be at the Rosen Hotel in Orlando

Tim Loomer - President and CEO (10 Minutes)
Tim spoke about his background, first 60 days, and the future of CM

Tim's Background

• Sold Scantron
• Fell in love with CM
• Moved to Boca

First 60 Days

• Committed to CM improvement processes
• Spoke with several customers (approx. 20 within first 60 days)
• Discussed his impression of the customer base.

Future of CM

• Discussed desire to move learning tools inward so there are training tools etc.
• Importance of measuring. New team being led by Tim Gilbert. Focus on metrics for various tasks.
• Focus on finishing up initiatives in place rather than starting other new initiatives.
• Look at release process, and review the number of releases per year. Don't want to force training sessions upon customers for new releases. STABILITY and QA focus for next 12 months.
  

3 Commitments

1. Transparency
2. Outward facing toward customers
   
3. Continuous Improvement

Jason Roberts - Chief Strategy Officer

Jason's role was to put the current state of Higher Education and specifically the Campus Management Software Tools in a broad Perspective. Quick review of history of 20 years ago, 10 years ago - > This led into a very nice tribute to David Meek. While it wasn't particularly engaging from a content standpoint, it was nice to see the culture of the company paying respects to its originator.

Patric Edmondson - SVP of Product Development

OK. Lesson number 1 - this blogging thing really takes a lot of battery power and mine are about to run out. When are these conference centers going to make power more readily available?