Educause: 7 Things You Should Know About…
EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association and the foremost community of IT leaders and professionals committed to advancing higher education.
The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s (ELI’s) 7 Things You Should Know About … TM series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies and related practices. Each brief focuses on a single technology or practice.
The current list of 7 Things titles is here.
While not a useful predictor of future trends (e.g. podcasts and virtual labs are nothing new), this EDUCAUSE series is delightfully bite-sized. I especially liked how they describe the current shortcomings and possible futures of each EdTech. I also found their embedded links helpful for leapfrogging to more resources. This could be a handy resource for educators and admin unfamiliar with EdTech, and/or who are unsure of where to begin.
As an educator you are constantly bombarded with new tools/ technology to use in your classroom and it can be quite overwhelming. With this source, each publication is about one sole piece of technology, and packed nicely into 2 page documents, where the info is laid out clearly, concisely, without distractions from ads, hyperlinks, or visuals. I agree with Laura, that the embedded links taking me to the sources directly is extremely helpful.
While I also agree that this source is not a useful predictor of trends (as their topics are current trends, rather than future trends), I would still find it useful in my role as tech coach due to the vast range of teacher tech skills (I have teachers still asking for support with tools most of us have been using for a while now). I can see this source being helpful when introducing teachers to new technologies; as its, brief, cut to the chase publications are easy to understand and give a great summary on the implications and significance of a specific tool/ technology to Education. For example more schools in my district are starting to explore 3D printing (as material costs are becoming more feasible), and I found a brief on 3D printing from 2012 that would still be relevant for me to use with colleagues today:
https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2012/7/eli7086-pdf.pdf
I enjoy this source, but in addition to reporting more on current trends, rather than future ones, another downfall is that the reports are not updated/ published as frequently as the other Market Projections (having only published 4 briefs in 2020 thus far).
I’ve actually been subscribed to EDUCAUSE emails for a while — my manager recommended that I do so pretty early on in my job.
Having said that, I rarely read anything that comes in but that’s probably more of a me problem…
I do skim the subject lines though, and it always looks like there’s relevant information being shared. Not a huge fan of “X things to pay attention to for Y” articles, but we can’t argue that this formula does help with (1) focus and (2) organization — it’s just a little boring.
For me, I feel like EDUCAUSE’s biggest strength is the size of its community. This is likely how the site generates enough resources to be better built and more “up to date” / active. The number of members also helps with the diversity of the materials being generated — there are all sorts of educators and education roles out there and EDUCAUSE appears to have something for everyone, from topics like “Enterprise IT” to “Student Success”.
EDUCAUSE may be useful and valuable to a broad community of educators and venturers based on how many topics it covers. Although it focuses more on recent and past innovations than future ones, the reports are concise and as others have remarked, bite-sized.
I expect to seek out future versions of this report because I want to balance my game-based learning units with other ventures. Personally, I think using these articles to host small workshops with peers and colleagues could be valuable starting point for those that want to dip their toes into newer ventures without feeling overwhelmed. I would recommend these articles to others during lunch and learns. Some of the schools I’ve worked at had staff members hosting technology workshops for 10-15 minutes to teach something that is easily implementable and convenient for teachers to use.
I loved how I was able to find 3 “7 things you should know…” articles on the first page that dealt with things I have been working on in our school. The information was thought-provoking and made me think differently about the topics and how I was dealing with them. Bookmarked it!