On Friday night the ECT board met with the AECT board and spoke a bit about what we really do. The ECT board is mostly responsible for fundraising and presenting awards funded by bequests of money given for specific purposes under specfic guidelines.

I, for one, found this information very informative since I really never knew what the ECT board was doing in all of those marathon meetings, as you might be curious what goes on behind the curtains at the board meetings. BTW- the notes to the board meetings are all posted and not too hard to get to from the AECT.ORG main page. Throughout the conference there was contention about the usability of the AECT.ORG site. It may be fine to have things somewhere on there, but if you can’t find them it’s not much help. Someone suggested that we have a usability committee and get it right.
This seems like a wonderful idea since personally I always feel that I’m being dismissed when I need some information and the only answer I can get is that it can be found on the website.
This is even more true if I’ve already spend a good 45 minutes looking for it.

Saturday Morning was where the conference should have started. The strategic planning committee gave their interim report with Dick Cornell doing most of the speaking. I was very pleased to hear the quality of work and thought they put into the report and they seem to be on exactly the same wavelength as myself, so I volunteered to serve on the committee. Here are some highlights gleaned from the online survey that 17% of our members answered specific order:

We don’t sell ourselves, we need to find and keep grad students, publicizing and bringing in people. We need to create an interdisciplinary summit.

We need to broaden professional membership base and identify strategic markets to get new members.

Capture the excitement, passion and creativity that we seem to have lost.

Renew advocacy for the field of ed tech to our many publics

Use new and emerging technologies to facilitate communication

Act on member interest in new professional development, e.g. online e-academy, seminars by subscription etc.

Increase recognition of current research, expertise and professional community.

Look at convention planning, marketing, programming

Determine satisfaction or lack thereof with current publications

Re-assess role of Headquarters staff, strategic analysis of work , and association budget.

Reconstitute and expand strategic task force

Assign accountability

Present implementation plans to the board and timelines.

Addie Kinslinger, Don Littlle, Nate Lowell and Dick Cornell gained my highest praise and gratituted for getting this massive ball rolling.

There were a lot of questions and answers. One question I asked (I don’t keep quiet too much), was: What differentiates us from other similar organizations? Everyone on the committee answered in the same fashion. What differentiates us is that everyone involved in AECT considers ourself family. That is what I believe and the answer I was hoping to hear. It IS what makes us different.

A FEW NOTES ON CONVENTION ITEMS AND SUCH

The year after Orlando, we will be in Dallas, but thankfully not in hotel world where we, as in Atlanta, were been cut off from everything. We will be right downtown across from the convention center and be scheduled in conjunction with Educause (I believe, but it might be another similar conference) which will provide the trade show that some members fell important

Next time around there will be only one round of proposals. It sounded liike a good idea, but it just didn’t work out.

This is getting way too long, but after a shaky start, we wound up with quite a productive bunch of meetings. I only wish it were done in the reverse order. After all, if we don’t understand that you start with the task and then worry about how to get there, in the words of Walt Kelly: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

David Winograd
DDL Board Rep

With Communication as the third letter of AECT, it seemed that very little of it was done on Friday.

The day seemed to start at the end and work backwards since I would think that a task or objective would come before how to accomplish such. Read the order of what what happened and then read it backwards and it should make more sense.

Nate Lowell and Don Little kicked off the meeting at 8am talking about blogging, its importance, potential and practice. Unless you had a computer in front of you to follow along, and pay for online access, the talk was theoretical and confusing to many. Tying blogging to a specific and defined purpose was hinted at but not totally addressed.
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Authored by Mary Herring and Sharon Smaldino
ISBN 0-89240-112-5

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