Speaking

Dr. Charles R. Severance

I enjoy public speaking and am happy to speak to groups on a wide variety of topics that I find personally interesting and exciting. Usually I am asked to speak at meetings that I would love to go to anyways so there is no speaker fee. At times I do receive an honorarium - and that is much appreciated.

This is a set of recent talks I have given or proposed. I can easily adapt and or combine material depending on the audience. Here are my archived presentation materials.

The University As A Cloud: Trends in Openness in Education
This talk and discussion will consist of three separate but related themes about the vision of strategic opportunities for higher education for the next 20 years. The general view is that Universities need to apply the concept of "open" across their entire enterprise. This will result in the boundaries between the university and the world outside of the university becoming increasingly blurry. The move toward a more porous approach across the domain of higher education activity is necessary to maintain the relevance, value, and competitive advantages of institutions, as society becomes increasingly open and open. It is a trait that becomes "expected". We will examine opportunities for universities to accentuate their strengths and positive qualities in an era of openness. The specific topics will include: (1) trends in open technology applied to teaching learning and collaboration, (2) trends in moving toward technology literacy as a core part of the definition of a Liberal Arts education, and (3) trends in content creation and publishing that are beginning to revolutionize how we will create, publish, and curate the intellectual output of higher education. The format of the talk will be a short strategic position papers on each of three topics, a short "lightning talk" about each of the topics and an interactive discussion about each of the three topics.

Teaching Informatics to Everyone: The End of Dilbert
People will look at old Dilbert comics in 50 years and will no longer understand why they are funny. The word "nerd" will simply be a "funny arcane word" like the word "flapper". In this presentation we look past the time where technology was the domain of the elite few and instead technology skills become basic skills that all educated people must posses. We will look at how a completely new set of courses, curricula, books and teaching methods are needed to reach the point where we all possess necessary technology skills. Examples will be drawn from the new undergraduate Informatics program at the University of Michigan as well as the graduate programs in the School of Information.

The presentation will be a very out-of-the box look at how we need to take technology and move it into the mainstream so we need to revise the old saying to be "reading, writing, and technology". The examples and topics covered will range from the practical and pragmatic design of real courses, books and curricula to the more fanciful imaginary long-term transformation in education that I feel must and will take place over the next 50 years.

Evolving Teaching and Learning: Beyond the LMS (Apple Academix)
The LMS market today faces a strange contradiction - few teachers truly *love* their current LMS but at the same time no one wants to endure the pain of switching to a new LMS. The LMS vendors are slowly cloning each other's features and innovation is slowing. At the same time how people teach and how people learn using technology is constantly changing and evolving. Teachers continuously experiment with technologies outside of the LMS system with varying levels of success. When teachers leave their LMS to teach they take full responsibility of the technology experience with varied results for both the teachers and students. In a way we need to have our cake and eat it too. We want the security, stability, and common user interface of an enterprise LMS but with the ability to mix in tools and content from many sources including tools and content produced by teachers, groups of teachers, and from various publishers and repositories. It seems that for the past few years, we have been waiting for a transformative approach that will improve what we can do with technology and teaching without losing the aspects of LMS systems that work well. It is not a question of "will this transformation will happen?" - but only "when will the transformation happen"? This talk will discuss some of the stresses and conflicts in the uses of the current LMS systems and talk about how we can gently evolve LMS systems into a whole new life form without upsetting the LMS ecosystem. The concept of placing LMS systems into content instead of placing content into LMS systems will be introduced and early research into the area will be shown and described.

Reopening Open - What is the Real Meaning of Open?
It has been over 20 years since the the Gnu Public License (GPL) and Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) licenses were created. In the beginning, Open Source was a very radical notion and was seen as a way to foment a new social contract around software and later content. In this talk, we look at the motivation and context of the early open licenses and the software development communities that formed as an extension of the activist origins of the Open movement (i.e. the bazaar). We also look at the phase where the notion of Open has moved from radical-far-out to the mainstream as it became clear that these open bazaar-style communities actually had advantages over the more traditional styles of organization. We look at how the concept of "open" has been redefined away from its activist roots so that it can be applied to more traditional and even completely closed-source proprietary solutions. We also look at how the concept of open has moved into content through the Creative Commons and the kinds of new ways of working now that we have a reasonable structure for content reuse and remixing. In addition, we will look forward at the potential problems that "Open" must face going forward and look for a way for us to get back to the roots of open.

Clouds on the Horizon: Evolving Teaching, Learning and Technology in Higher Education
This presentation will examine the effects of emerging trends in Cloud Computing on the future of higher education. Cloud Computing is already transforming how we teach and learn, and will further redefine the relationships among Information Technology and other campus groups. We will explore how its initiatives can be embraced and leveraged to better serve those constituencies. Innovations and research in Cloud Computing are driven primarily by the commercial sector; higher education is therefore at risk of waiting too long to understand and fully exploit its benefits. We will take a long-term strategic overview of how higher education can partner with Cloud Computing to take a more active role in harnessing and shaping its future.

New Opportunities for Teaching and Learning: Extending Learning Management Systems Using Standards
The IMS Learning Tools Interoperability standard is available in Desire2Learn, Blackboard, Sakai, Moodle, and WebCT so a learning tool can be written that integrates into these LMS systems. This presentation will give an overview of IMS LTI, show its use in an LMS and show developer resources for LTI. IMS LTI gives the teams that support LMS systems on campuses a great deal of new flexibility. Instead of building each new capability inside of the LMS, IMS LTI allows these tools to be developed and hosted outside of the LMS much like a Facebook or OpenSocial application. Also tool vendors will have access to the full range of the LMS marketplace with a single integration making it possible for a tool like Wimba to be used in all of the LMS systems on a campus. As the LMS market matures and LMS systems become enterprise software, there is less and less opportunity to innovate inside of the LMS. This means that experimental approaches to teaching and learning cannot be explored without affecting the reliability of the enterprise LMS. IMS LTI allows the IT staff to meet the needs of teachers to use innovative software without destabilizing the enterprise LMS. In the long run, this allows us to meet both the demand for innovation as well as the demand for high scalability and reliability.

CloudSocial: A New Approach to Enabling Open Content for Broad Reuse
CloudSocial is a new approach to socially enhanced learning that allows learners to move among any web-based resources and have their learning environment and co-learners move with them. CloudSocial enables web-accessible learning content to be used by a wide variety of formal and informal learning environments without requiring the information to be copied into each of the learning environments. Instead, the learning systems integrate themselves into the content. This will allow dramatic increases in the accessibility, flexibility and interactivity of most all web content, but especially of open content, no matter what its format. It will thus be possible to integrate open content more easily into a wider variety of teaching and learning contexts and potentially increase the use and value of open content. CloudSocial enables the formation of informal learning cohorts who can work together to collaboratively learn a subject using content from a wide range of sources outside of, within, or alongside of current formal learning environments. Courses will add a "map" of Internet resources to access and use---as the learners move between web resources their chosen learning system will follow them. CloudSocial is not a "single LMS' - rather it is a set of extensible protocols and capabilities that allow any LMS to interact with the CloudSocial enabled content. CloudSocial makes use of the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability protocol to integrate the learning systems into the content. CloudSocial is currently under development by the the University of Michigan Medical School and OpenMichigan project. CloudSocial is in its early stages of pre-alpha rollout.