Higher Ed

Greetings from Edmonton, Alberta.  I’m here for the 5th Annual Canadian E-Learning Conference, which is hosted by the University of Alberta.

The conference, which involves about 180 people, lasts two and a half days, and the program theme is “Learn, Teach, Inspire.” Previous conferences have been fantastic, so the excitement level was high as we prepared to dive into the presentations and panels yesterday.

The keynotes have been very interesting:

“The Fusion of Learning, Gaming and Virtual Reality” – Chris Melissinos, Chief Gaming Officer, Sun Microsystems

“Working Together to Build the 21st Century Campus” – Richard Caccavale, Senior Director of Solutions Engineering, Blackboard

I met Chris Melissinos of Sun Tuesday evening. He has a palpable and infectious passion for games—that might be putting it mildly—and everyone expected him to give a great talk to kick things off yesterday morning.

At the opening banquet, I met or re-connected with people from:

Collège Communautaire du Nouveau-Brunswick

Keyano College

Mount Royal College

New Brunswick College

NorQuest College

Red Deer College

Simon Fraser University

University of British Columbia

University of Calgary

University of Western Ontario

And there are representatives from many more schools than that. Someone’s even attending from Brasil.

Today I’ll give a presentation titled “Building Community Online: Lessons Learned from Seven Years of ‘Ask Dr. C,’” and will hone in on what’s made the ‘Ask Dr. C’ program so special and long-lasting, while also offering general tips and observations about community building—maybe I should call them “badly kept secrets of success” to spice things up?

I’ll post an update soon to let you know how things here at the conference are going.