SB Viking: First full day of Educause.

Boy it's been a busy day, exhaustion is quite an option after four separate seminars. One quick perk was apparent though, being a West Coaster I wasn't too far removed from my normal schedule. A number of folks are from the East Coast, and they were all up bright and early around four. :)

There are a bit over fifty of use in the conference with seven faculty. Our general sessions are held in this larger room but we split into smaller rooms for most of our activities.

This morning started with 'the Changing Faces of IT' in which we talked about some of the future trends to be expected in University IT. From straight forward items like the growing power of open source to more exotic items like the influence in gaming on the teaching in University.

Fortunately the sessions are broken up by frequent breaks. Breaks that see a considerable rush for coffee. The sun was back today as this storm moved on, and the temperature was up a good 15 degrees from yesterday. So outdoor breaks were encouraged.

After the morning session we broke into two smaller 'tracks' for the remainder of the day. We had three more sessions during this, one on time management, one on leadership, and one on communication.

Naturally, any seminar on time management is doomed to run over time...which we did. Not a problem though as it was very informative. A lot of what struck attendees as novel or new were items I'd been doing for ages (thanks Ray for teaching me to use to-do lists!)

The leadership one was also quite informative, while I found I was doing a pretty good job, it showed me how much more I have to learn. My staff should see a lot better care from me once I fully digest what we went over.

The communication seminar was also very interesting. Seems my biggest problem is not listening closely, something that I'd been aware of at some level, but not enough to act on it. So that's marked for improvement. I also found that I had perfectly balanced the four aspects of communication, which either means I'm great at communicating or just can't shut up. I leave that one for history to decide. :)

I skipped doing a group dinner and hiked around old town Boulder. Silly me, I had a camera yet failed to take many pictures. Also, 5700' elevation is a bit much for a beach dog like me, especially one as out of shape as I.

The city is beautiful, and very much a college town. Lots of pubs and lots of pan handlers, kinda like IV but with class and merchants.