AcademiX Review
Originally published on macresearch.org, around 2009. Reproduced from the author's archive; some links may no longer resolve.
AcademiX at MIT
Author: Drew McCormack
On March 26th, 2009 at MIT, Apple and MacLearning.org (link no longer available) held the first of four AcademiX (link no longer available) conferences primarily focussed on emergent technologies in teaching. The one-day conference included many interesting presentations, and finished with a poster session. Presentations covered a wide range of interesting technologies, not all of it from Apple.
There were also a series of pre-conference workshops, where attendees could learn about Podcast Producer or get an introduction to iPhone development. Given that the whole conference was free, including the workshops, and meals during the event, you have to have a good excuse not to go if you live close by. I actually flew in from Europe to attend, and still paid less than about $500 for the whole experience.
I already have experience (link no longer available) with iPhone development, and no desire to podcast at this point, so I skipped the pre-conference workshops. After registration, the conference proper kicked off with a keynote from Vijay Kumar on MIT’s OpenCourseWare (link no longer available) program and other developments in ‘open learning’.
If you are not familiar with OpenCourseWare, MIT makes much of their teaching material available free of charge under a creative commons license. This material can be used by academics at other universities and colleges around the world in their own courses, or simply by self learners outside the tertiary system. The material is available via several channels, including iTunesU and YouTube.
The second keynote presentation was from Paul Hammond and Richard Miller from Rutgers University. Their presentation was clearly highly rehearsed, and very professional. They took it in turns to do the talking, while at the same time running a movie continually on the projector screen. The text and movie were very well choreographed, leaving the audience highly impressed. You don’t see many presentations as well polished as this was.
The talk itself was about using tools like Final Cut Pro in creative writing courses. The idea is that where pen and paper are the traditional tools of writing, media tools like Final Cut Pro should become the pen and paper of the future. It is certainly an interesting approach, but I couldn’t help wondering whether they weren’t just starting a film and television school in their English department. It seemed like many of the skills they were teaching were technical aspects of using the software, and that a student of documentary film making might receive a very similar education. All in all, very entertaining, if a little abstract.
The conference split into two streams leading up to lunch. I sat in on a panel discussion of iTunesU, and a talk by Alex Chapin (link no longer available) of Middlebury College. Alex is an Educational Technologist in the field of second language acquisition. He makes use of iTunes and iPod to teach students at the college in very inventive ways. Basically, he has setup his courses so that students can course media directly into iTunes, and sync it to an iPod. By making creative use of metadata such as lyrics and album art, the standard iPod music player becomes almost as able bodied as a dedicated app for language learning. Students hear words several times, see the words on the screen, and can even use the built in ratings and play counts as a means of concentrating on those words or phrases that need the most work.
I gave my own presentation in the afternoon. It covered emergent technologies in science and science education, and was an overview of interesting developments, from multi-core and GPU computation, to Amazon Web Services and the convergence of desktop and web applications (eg SproutCore and Cappuccino (link no longer available)). The presentation had to be prepared at the last minute due to another speaker dropping out, so it was a bit patchy in all honesty, and the subject matter was not entirely suited to the venue.
The big closing keynote was by Charles Severance. As I later learned at the poster session, Charles has had an interesting career, beginning in High-Performance Computing (HPC), and then moving into education where he founded the Sakai (link no longer available) Learning Management System (LMS). His talk was very entertaining, and discussed the current situation in the LMS universe, and how ‘Dr Chuck’ thinks we can move forward. (Turns out Charles is also a Google App Engine enthusiast, and has authored the first book on App Engine for O’Reilly, due out very soon.)
After the presentations, those of us remaining moved onto the MIT museum (link no longer available), a stunning location for the poster presentations, and buffet dinner. In all there were about 10 posters on display, including two posters for commercial applications: my own Mental Case (link no longer available) study tool, and Woolamaloo (link no longer available), a tool for configuring iTunesU. These commercial offerings were ineligible for a prize, leaving only 8 posters to fight over some seriously nice toys, including a MacBook and MacBook Pro. Nice odds.
The winners of the poster session were a group from MIT. They were using Amazon Web Services to teach students how to run software on parallel compute clusters, amongst other things.
All in all it was a very enjoyable and informative day. The quality of the speakers was very high, which kept things interesting for me even when the subject matter lay way outside my own field of expertise. Apple have said they will probably make videos of the talks available at some point; we’ll try to post something here when/if they become available.
There are still three more (link no longer available) AcademiX conferences in the 2009 series. If you are in any way involved in higher education, I recommend you try to free up some time in your schedule to attend.