mmm... useless conferences...

so today I spent pretty much the entire day at a completely useless conference. i'm in educational technology, and there was this "interactive learning systems" company putting on a conference that offered "no sales pitches" and "free food" so my boss and i were like "sweet" and decided we'd go. No, for real, some of the sessions looked intriguing and it was free so we signed up.

yeah. big mistake.

session one was all about how the United States Air Force is using $600k to create a gaming simulation to help officers deal with cultural awareness in situations. an extra 100k was given to the company (which is based in India, by the way) to make the game more "immersive"... in other words, that money went to making sure there was a female voice and that their shirts were the correct color of soldiers' shirts. meanwhile, the entire thing is "choose your own adventure" style, meaning that people have like, 4 choices, one which is clearly obvious, and they get to choose the appropriate action. So in other words, your government is spending money on shit that is useless. thank you, session one.

oh. and the old dude in front of me was clipping his fingernails throughout the entire session. like, out in the open, on top of the table and everything. sick. I would later find out that he is president of some online university. not that that's saying anything about online universities or anything.

which leads me to session two. which was some dude from a rather well known for profit online university telling us about "the future of online education." now, don't get me wrong... I am all for online education. it's kind of one of the things that I "do". it can be done extremely well, and can be quite affective, if the needs of the learner are taken into account and if there is ample opportunity for social learning and customization built within the course. However, I don't think that many of the for profit online institutions (such as the University of Phoenix and it's counterparts) are good examples of effective online programs. There's a reason why they're not very highly regarded by real universities. In short, I think they pretty much suck and offer sub-par "educational" opportunities to people. Why do I think that? enter session two. dude spends the entire time telling us that the future of online education is going to be these "canned courses," where all instructional content is the same and standardized, with little customization and little social interaction, has as little instructor interaction as possible (thus offering dramatic profit gains over the current educational system) and that everyone will be able to reach an "educational nirvana" because they'll have access to these self-contained canned courses.

this is just stupid. There is a reason why MIT and many other prestigious institutions are offering much of their instructional course content online, for free, for anyone to look at. it's called open courseware, and basically, it runs on the philosophy that, when students pay for an education at MIT, they are in large part paying for the opportunity to interact with and learn from an expert in a particular field. that's valuable because learning is inherently social. Sure, there's so much that we can learn on our own, without the help of other people, but there's so much more that we can learn by interacting with experts in the field.

grrrrrrr.

sessions three and four were basically people who were presenting statistics from articles that they had read. They were a bit more on target, in terms of what information we were seeking, but the articles they were pulling information from were out of journals that we already read regularly (and were kind of out of date) so, in other words, pretty much useless.

So, in other words, my workday was totally shot, unless you count getting out of work early because the conference ended at 3 and getting to stop by Dice's office to have coffee with him.

I'm off to be productive, since I pretty much avoided it all day.