![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.wabash.edu\/www2images\/educause_exhibition_hall.JPG\")
<\/p>\nI’m a bit behind in my review of Educause 2006, which I attended last Tuesday-Thursday. I’ll get caught up today and tomorrow with my summary.<\/p>\n
The exhibition hall at Educause is always an interesting visit. More than 200 vendors offer information and demonstrations on all types of technology products. Here’s a view of the show.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Huge displays are offered by higher-ed focused companies such as Blackboard and Datatel, as well as major technology vendors such as Dell, Apple, and Microsoft. Beyond the Microsoft Windows Vista<\/a> and Blackboard Learning System<\/a> demos though, some of the most intriguing products come from the smaller companies near the back of the hall.<\/p>\n One example: I watched an interesting demonstration of a new TechSmith<\/a> (makers of Snagit and Camtasia) product called Morae<\/a>. Morae is a product designed for usability testing of web sites and software applications–it lets you easily log, observe, and analyze the user experience. We’ll explore this further in the coming weeks as a possible tool for further analyzing the Wabash web site.<\/p>\n Presentations continued all day Wednesday as well. The highlight was a keynote address by Ray Kurzweil<\/a>, founder of nine businesses<\/a> in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, and other areas of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n Kurzweil’s talk was titled The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Education and Society<\/i>. The final sentence in the abstract sums up his fascinating talk: "The nature of education will change when humans merge with nonbiological intelligence. We don\u2019t yet have communication ports in our biological brains to download the interneuronal connection and neurotransmitter patterns that represent our learning–a profound limitation of the biological paradigm we now use for our thinking that we will overcome." Something to look forward to in 2045.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m a bit behind in my review of Educause 2006, which I attended last Tuesday-Thursday. I’ll get caught up today and tomorrow with my summary. The exhibition hall at Educause is always […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-staff-info"],"w_featured_image_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/technotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/technotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/technotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/technotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/technotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/technotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/technotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/technotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/technotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}