Virtual Conferences

Sloan-C has been considering getting more heavily into standalone virtual conference activities.  Our current virtual conferences that are attached to the on-ground conferences have been doing well, but there now appears to be a need for a virtual conference that will enable many more participants to take part in our knowledge dissemination efforts.

On July 25, 2010, I gave the commencement speech at American Sentinel University in Denver.  Here is the approximate text of the address: 

Online education: why you are perfectly positioned to succeed in life

Thank you President Adams,  Chief Executive Oliver, the faculty of American Sentinel University and honored guests for inviting me to speak today.  It is pleasure to be here to provide a few thoughts on the occasion of this commencement.

We communicate with each other in a wide variety of ways.  Recently, social media has been the rage - indeed even SloanConsortium has over 1600 followers on Twitter (wow!)....   What I'm wondering is what is the contrast between the rapid 140 character communication permitted by twitter and the longer posts of listservs.  Sloan-C has used a listserv for a long long time to discuss matters pertinent to online education.  I note that the list size has not grown substantially in recent years.  However, twitter has grown exponentially and is now perhaps twice as la

I thought I'd make a few observations about personal branding and about how Sloan-C might capitalize on findings that seem to be coming over the transom.  First, over the last two semesters, I've given my MBA students an assignment to improve their "personal brands" as a semester long exercise. What is a "personal brand" anyway?  -- well, it is just YOU.  What you say, what you know, what you want to do and have done, shared with the world. People see it as using social media to let everyone know about you.

Dear Sloan-C Members:

We are pleased to announce that the Sloan Consortium is collaborating with Hewlett-Packard on a new program called the HP Catalyst Initiative. The overall goal of the initiative is to create international collaborative “sandboxes” of innovation that will explore what the future of STEM education can look like—a future where students use their technical and creative ingenuity to address urgent social challenges in their communities and around the world.

Education, as practiced in much of higher education is instructor-led, including online education.  In recent years there has been a flurry of interest in the use of open educational resources for learning with some organizations pushing the agenda that students can learn difficult topics simply by relying on what peer students know or can determine.  Some have questioned this concept and have suggested that instructor expertise is needed to guide cohorts of student learners.

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