IT Fatigue

The ICT Summit happened. Since I became Interim Director of the IT Program, it's been a the largest thing on the horizon. It was great to finally reach it and now have it safely behind me.

I thought we had a pretty good lineup: Interesting exhibitors, good panels, free lunch, and a poster session. But attendance was spotty -- especially early. It proved harder than I had expected both to recruit speakers and to attract an audience. And to get people to actually show up.

One mistake I made was trying to do too much stuff myself. I ended up giving the opening remarks, coordinating the first panel, and running the IT Challenge. I really should have found other people to do all that stuff -- or maybe just done one.

The IT Challenge turned out great. In the end, I was only able to recruit three teams of students to compete. I wasn't sure how difficult to make the puzzles: In the end, I backed off of the difficulty a bit (giving some additional clues), but I needn't have worried. They struggled a bit with the first puzzle but, after that, one team just sailed through the rest and, by 10:45, had completed the challenge. They came in at lunch time to receive their prizes and the accolades of the attendees.

I was pleased with my opening remarks and the first panel. Looking back at the issues that were raised over the course of the day, I think they were exactly on target.

It was a fascinating day. There were wonderful parallels and contrasts between the face-to-face education panel and the MOOC panel, just as I'd hoped. The prototyping/design panel was captivating. The open science panel was totally orthogonal in one plane and the alumni from ILM orthogonal in another another. Unfortunately, there were very few people who managed to attend all of the panels. A lot of people seemed to show up for one panel and then disappear. What was really interesting was the triangulation that came from hearing all of the blind men feeling the elephant speak. You get a less complete picture, when you only listen to one.

I think an important issue is that IT is becoming invisible as it transforms the world we live in. Everyone uses IT now without thinking of it as "IT". People are familiar with email and the web and smart phones. And familiarity breeds contempt: people are coming to think that they already know as much about IT as they need to know.

But the revolution is only beginning. And higher ed should be look to newspapers and journalism for a sense of the transformation that technology is likely to bring.