Really loved this mornings keynote, the speaker made a clear cut, well supported argument for why organizations need to think about and embrace disruptive forces in the market. Higher Ed is ripe for major changes in this regard, even if we ignore the 800-pound gorilla that is online learning, there are numerous ways we can do a better job embracing the “disruptive” technologies that have made their way on campus in an effort to better to serve our students and faculty.

Area’s that I’m Personally excited about:
Web Publishing / Story Telling
– SB You and our Drupal offerings have huge potential to transform how we communicate our goals at an organizational, departmental and personal levels.

Course Catalog Enhancements
– We took a big step with Classie Syallabus, Classie Evals and Class Find but theres still so much more we can do to do a better job “selling” our courses and getting the right student in the right class so that they can be successful.

Community Building
– Yammer is one of those technologies that can immediately transform how we collaborate and share ideas with each other in a cross functional way. But very quickly the sheer amount of data (noise) being shared can choke out the ability to find content and area’s that interest an individual (what’s noise to me may be a symphony to you).

Looking outside of yammer theres so many ways we can collect community input and share it in a ways that allow for debate and positive institutional change

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The sessions today were interesting, Acquia discussed their new partner certification inititatives and I heard from other large (non-education) organizations and how they are solving their multi-site headaches. Its amazing how the same challenges affect us all. It really seems to come down to having a robust theme that enables effective story telling.

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Lunch was unique in that I managed to sit down with the CEO of Acquia, who prior to this conference I really didn’t know much about. I was impressed with how engaged he was in this conference and how much he values and appreciates the efforts of his team.

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I attended an afternoon session discussing the pillars of successful web implementations which outlined the key focus of most web initiatives: mobile, content, seo, advertising, email, automation, data & social and how your web platform is the foundation of the elements. I got some useful tools to checkout including http://www.vidyard.com/ and was reminded that I really need to take the time and upgrade our Google Analytics to the latest version.

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The closing keynote focused on Responsive Web Design and the tradeoffs in building Rich web experiences across all devices. It reinforced what I already felt, but its clear that I really need to look at creating a performance budget/goal.

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Overall I’m really glad I made the trek up here and probably the biggest take away is even in industry and organizations with seemingly large budgets team-sizes tend to be small (3-5 technical resources) but are supplemented by strong vendor partnerships.