Educause Videos + Podcasts Now Available

Educause is a higher education information technology association that sponsors the largest IT event in higher education in the US, and probably the world. This year's annual conference was in Dallas, Texas, earlier this month and drew close to 8000 participants. As of today, you can view videos of 10 of the hundred or more sessions that were held that week - Go Here, then click on the Videos tab. One that I attended and thought was quite good is titled "Pioneering New Territory and Technology".

They also have some interview podcasts (yes, you can subscribe to the feed) on the same site, and will eventually put recordings up of all of the sessions for free (you currently need to pay). Much of the conference is really for university IT and eLearning people, but there is also a lot that is of potential interest to faculty.

NEW: Alternatively, you can subscribe to the Educause Podcast, which includes the interviews from Dallas, on the Educause Connect website on the Podcast tab.

Educause Connect

Educause Connect is a social networking website for people who are interested in all areas of technology in higher education. The site is organized by Tags (they seem to be pre-defined). The tag frequencies as of today were:

• Open Source (256)
• Blog (WebLog) (181)
• EDUCAUSE_ANNUAL (164)
• Teaching and Learning (159)
• E-Learning (95)
• Cybersecurity (94)
• OSS (Open Source Software) (93)
• Podcasting (68)
• Information Systems and Services (63)
• Policy and Law (59)
• Instructional Design (58)
• Social Software/Social Computing (57)
• Raves (55)
• Copyright / Intellectual Property Policies (53)
• CNI - Coalition for Networked Information (51)
• Rants (48)
• Events (47)
• Libraries and Technology (44)
• EDUCAUSE Conferences (41)
• Net Generation Learner (36)
• Intellectual Property Rights (34)
• Learning Space Design (33)
• Social Software (33)
• Blogs (32)
• Microsoft (30)

Each of these leads to a separate page on which numerous resources are brought together. Major sections on these pages include:

1. Featured Content and Primary Publications - from several sources, both text and multimedia
2. Community, including a Wiki, Educause-based Blogs that include the tag word, Jobs, Events, People
3. Elsewhere on the Net, which has the same categories as Community, but lists information from outside of Educause

All of these sections can also be subscribed to via an RSS feed, which I did for my favorite topics.

I stumbled upon this site through and email from the Educause national meeting that is coming up in October in Dallas, Texas. It looks relatively new, with almost none of the wikis having been started by anyone yet. And the site notes that it will be adding more resources in the future. Very worthwhile way of getting information, news and thoughts on your favorite new media applications in higher education. Check it out!