What We Learned at FUSION

We asked CCCOnline staff what they learned from last week’s Desire2Learn FUSION conference. Responses follow, and we’ll continue to showcase them next week!

• David Chatham, Dean of Academic Technology, commented on Jonah Lehrer’s keynote, in which Mr. Lehrer discussed the marshmallow kids experiment* and the possibility of predicting factors for success:
  
  “That is the key to our interest in analytics. If we can determine the key factors for keeping students progressing in their college career, then we’ve accomplished something additionally worthwhile with our D2L installation by mining the data that provides us with the clues.”
  
  *See “Don’t! The Secret of Self-Control,” Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker, 5/18/2009.



• Natalie Jeremijenko, another keynote speaker, discussed the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic at NYU and its use of emerging technologies for social change. Sean Renner, Instructional Designer, found Prof. Jeremijenko’s keynote to be the most inspirational part of the conference:
  
  “I thought it was an amazing way to combine activism with art, and was an incredible example of thinking way outside the box making a difference in an area you care about in some of the most creative ways possible. For me, and I think for all of us working to provide new and creative opportunities for education, there’s a lot there that inspired me.
  
  The most useful thing I learned was the current, and upcoming features in the ‘insert stuff’ tool, allowing users to directly embed videos almost anywhere in D2L, and soon add youtube and flickr videos via a direct connection with D2L.”