Edu Web Conference Day 1

Today was the first day of the Edu Web Conference.  Conveniently it’s at the Trump Marina in Atlantic City this year, so it’s only a few minutes away.  I figured that I’d take Delilah Road out there and shoot right out to the marina district, but of course there’s some major construction going on and the road is closed.  So I had to turn around and took the Black Horse Pike instead.  Not too big of a detour.

I got there with plenty of time to spare so I checked out a few of the vendors set up in the lobby.  It seemed to be mostly CMS vendors and email marketing solutions.  Nothing too interesting there.  While both still have their uses I think they are in the twilight of their usefulness.  Open source CMS solutions are really getting mature at this stage and spam is really killing the effectiveness of email in my opinion (and that of the presenters too).

There were a lot of people there, I’d guess around 400-500.  Some came from far away.  Chatted with a friendly chap most likely from Ireland, and apparently there’s some folk all the way from New Zealand there as well.  Didn’t appear to be too many typical educators in the crowd (I will have to explain that type another day), mostly younger web people and some marketing people tossed in there for fun too.  I’d recommend purchasing some Apple stock as the majority of laptops there were Macs and the iPhone seemed to be brought up a lot.

 The opening presentation was pretty good.  It was titled “It’s the End of the Web as We Know It Redux” and was presented by Mark Greenfield, Director of Web Services, University at Buffalo.  He discussed the web in relation to higher education and where he thinks it’s going.  I did happen to share the majority of his visions, so it’s nice to know someone out there is on the same page with such topics.  His presentation can be found on his website.

Humorously the discussion of how they have their college catalog available online now was dead on with the views I happened to bring up in a little debate that was going on last week.  So it’s reassuring to hear that we have the same idea of sharing such information with our students that other institutions share.

In a room packed with big four year institutions, it’s great to know that our communtiy college by the shore is hanging with them if not ahead of most regarding our role on the web.  I had no idea where we stacked up with these schools living in my little bubble, but have to admit with the resources at hand we’re hanging in there and leading in some areas.  I guess that’s why I was just rewarded with a 4% raise, oh wait a minute so was everyone else…

After the presentation I hung out in the developers lounge for a little bit.  There were some guys in a dark room typing away on laptops and discussing mostly social networking and the implementation of CMS’s.  There were a lot of accents in that room, so I’d guess it was sponsored by some UK corporation.  I’ll have to ask tomorrow.  The late presentation didn’t really interest me too much so, I decided to leave at that point.  I was able to locate my car in the parking garage with no problems (I’ve had some disasters doing such in the past).

I’ll go back tomorrow morning and blog about anything interesting as well.  I’ll try and remember to bring a camera too and share some photos.