By Catherine Gray Beuten
Integrated University Communications

(June 3, 2009) Maintaining control of your message and getting a handle on rampant technological choices these days is a little like trying to lasso a cloud.

Keynote Ron Yanoskey, PhD, deputy director and senior follow of EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Science, told more than 150 participants at the eighth annual CU Online Symposium that when it comes to education technology, it might be best to support rather than restrict all the different technologies in use.

Recommending trusted resources and sites, he said, might be the answer rather than insisting on a lone technology. “Instead of an enterprise approach, they can assess the value and safety of resources within the institution and determine who they would like to use the trusted resources,” he said. Yanoskey is coauthor of the book The Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education in the Era of Cloud Computing.

Patience plays a key role as employees explore other technologies. Those who wander outside the accepted technologies, he said, “often crawl back to IT Services when the external system fails.”

For the first time, this event was held at Anschutz Medical Campus. Symposium sessions, many of which can be accessed online, included:

• Integrating multimedia into your course
• Easy online photo editing
• Putting laboratory sciences courses totally online
• Top new technologies
• Publishing your book with digital publisher
• Microtalks on academic technology
• A new syllabus building tool
• Storytelling to engage critical thinkers
• Open source content
• Making online learning fun
• Blackboard Wikis in the classroom

And, be sure to check out the annual symposium video that offers an overarching look at online learning with “Brian and David University.” Photo: CU Online Director David Thomas stands with Learnie the Lobster.