I attended the 10th annual Innovate conference at Ohio State yesterday. It was truly awesome in terms of gaining valuable knowledge and getting inspired. Innovate’s focus is actually active learning, although it has a strong tech emphasis and many of the presentations are about online courses or tech learning tools. Some of the best presentations foregrounded the "active" part over the "tech" part, which I consider to be perhaps the true substance of the conference. That said, the information and "how tos" on transformative tech tools are perhaps my biggest motives for attending the conference every year. I also enjoy talking to colleagues at the conference a great deal and much of what I learn is from those conversations. I couldn’t do all of the presentations I attended justice in a short blog post, such as this, but I will just say that they lived up to the conference’s themes of "excite, explore, experience." I also really appreciated the Imaginarium which allowed me to walk through a number of exciting project and interact with artifacts and have one-on-one conversations. Afternoon keynote, Shauna Chung, showed that students are engaged and genuinely inspired by the idea that their story matters. She also said, "we learn through making," and delved into the details of a personal storytelling video assignment. One of the elements she suggested was an essential part of what makes an assignment exciting is to teach not only what you want the students to make, but how you want them to make it and why. She said that "applying theoretical frameworks" for creating the video was an essential part of making the assignment valuable to students, a process which as a student she considered "one of the most profound experiences of her academic life." This gives me pause and makes me reflect upon how I might include the "hows" and "whys" of every assignment.

Innovate’s "Imaginarium"