Ohio Educational Technology Conference 2024 Day Two

 

Valentine's Day at the conference started off nice and early with the session A New Library System for Ohio's Academic Libraries & New Opportunities for Student Learning by Thelda Schwing, the associate director for Ohiolink. The member institutions of Ohiolink will be moving to a new system and our institution should be on it by next year. The new system is Ex Libris from Alma, which looks to be nice upgrade from our current system. It is built with e-resources in mind and has an search interface similar to what students might see in Google which may make it a less intimidating experience. It will integrate with other campus systems as well. Primo is the search feature and will allow searches across all member libraries. It will also all patrons to better understand how soon they might get a resource. For example, if a student needs a book by Friday, they can determine if it will arrive by then or whether they should select an electronic resource instead. Leganto will allow us to integrate our LMS and make it easier for professors to make materials available for students directly in their course. There is also some metadata that will allow professors to see which resources are being used and to make adjustments to what they are offering. College Credit Plus should also integrate better and allow students better options for access needed materials. I was glad to hear that they are working on bringing AI features to Ex Libris which I think will be important to expanding the future benefits of this product for our students. 

Thelda Schwing

 Trendy Technology to be and Instructional Designer presented by Beth Schwartz was a series of resources and thoughts to help instructors navigate the changed educational landscape. One of her main points was to not throw out some of the things we learned from teaching during the pandemic. Accessibility for students if still really important and well need to keep that in mind as we educate. She gave a personal account of her daughter who is immunocompromised and can't always be in a physical classroom. Connecting to her class via something like Zoom gives her a chance to continue learning and not fall behind. Students may need to be absent from a physical classroom for many reasons and using technology to allow for flexibility can only help. Another thought is the personalization that technology allows. Learning is much more powerful if we can make it relevant for the learner. Her example here was where a teacher had students working on personal hygiene and the students designed their own toothbrush holders and 3D printed them. We have lots flexibility using technology to make things more individualized for students. They no longer need to write a paper but could do a video or a podcast to show mastery. 

Using Drones in Video Production presented by Chris Flanery from WOUB demonstrated how drones can be used to give perspectives in video that you can't achieve easily with a normal ground camera. He mainly uses a drone to "set the scene" which allows the viewer to understand the context of an area from the larger perspective. Starting up from the air and approaching the subject as you move through something like a city, can give the viewer a sense of location. A done can also be used to simulate something that you may not have easy access to. For example, moving along a train track can give the viewer an impression of a train, without having to actually get a train and attach a camera to it. Finally, filming large objects like outdoor art installations are easy with a drone and give you a unique perspective for the viewer. If you have ever gone to Flight of the Hawk park in Lancaster, Ohio you can see how a video done with a drone can give you a perspective you can't see from the ground.

Drone with cage

Artificial Intelligence for Educators by Rebecca Odom-Bartel from Cleveland State University was a session that focused more on AI and what it is rather than ten things to do with AI or 1000 AI sites to try. While the former can be valuable, I found her presentation refreshing in that it gave a better foundational basis of what we mean when we talk about types of AI and how we can use AI to complement what we do. Using a process such as seek, select, integrate, implement, and assess will help us use AI effectively. An interesting little factoid that I picked up here is that nowadays there is about 4 yottabytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1024 )) per year of general information produced and an individual human is exposed to about 9 zettabytes (9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1021) per lifetime of information (I have not independently verified this ;-)

Our Robot Overlords

A modern Max Headroom

Happy little building

On Thursday I'll be taking a look at the following presentations: Embracing AI in the Classroom, How is Artificial Intelligence Changing the way we Learn?, The Bard's Tale: Google AI in Education, Design Thinking: A Hands-on Workshop, and Balancing Order and Innovation: Strategies for Effective Leaning Technology Leadership.