BuzzLion for Week of October 30

Hope everyone had a great Halloween and welcome to this week's BuzzLion. We start with two looks at a recent major higher education professional conference, EDUCAUSE. Audrey Romano, Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) Web developer, talks about what she saw at the conference that interested her. 

"The Educause sessions I attended were mostly focused on Leadership, Governance, and Management and Web and Media Development. Most of what I saw in the Web track were obvious over-generalizations about mobile web and accessibility without clear solutions or best practices -- mostly awareness driven. Several topics were being presented by Penn State staff, and generally I try to attend those that involve other institution's implementations. One of the stronger sessions was Spurring Others Toward Leadership in Our Profession by Keith McIntosh."

Next we have another view of EDUCAUSE from Matt Meyer, senior instructional designer with TLT. Matt shares what his conference experience was like this week in his blog. 

"danah boyd's session on 'Privacy in an Era of Social Media was definitely an extension of her talk at TLT Symposium in 2009. Her bottom line message seemed to be that as higher-education educators, we need to be ready provide students proper guidance in securing their privacy in the social webs. I like the the thought but I couldn't help but think the majority of those in attendance might not have much of an idea how to provide such mentorship for an number of reasons."

Conferences are great because people bring back so much great information to share, so we are going to take a look at another conference attendee's event report. Brian Young, TLT instructional designer, has found the conference he attended recently introduced him to something completely new.

"I wasn't around when Penn State adopted ANGEL. It was many years ago. I imagine it being an exciting time. I also imagine that there were concerns about scale, if things would work, etc. At this point, the LMS has become an entity, a utility, something that just is... I've worked in enough of these systems to know that none of them is a far leap from the other. I thought that until my recent trip to CanvasCon. 

This system is different. I don't normally get excited about technology. I see any of the technologies we as tools, as parts of a bigger scheme. They're all utilities to me. But this is different."

Shifting the subject, let's take a look at a helpful hint for the University Collaboration Suite (UCS) from Nikke Moore, IT trainer with Information Technology Services. 

"Within the UCS Web and Desktop Clients, users can separate email identities, called personas, to manage different types of email. For example, if you use a department e-mail alias such as itstraining@psu.edu, you can use this e-mail address by setting up a Persona."

Finally we end with an accessibility post from Elizabeth Pyatt, TLT instructional designer. Elizabeth offers a way to ensure your blog is accessible. 

"The content generated by the Blogs at Penn State is generally accessible, but you can adjust the CSS of your blog to enhance accessibility."

That's all for this week's BuzzLion - thanks for reading!