ProfHacker (& the Chronicle!) at SXSW EDU

This is a quick programming note to mention that I’ll be at SXSW EDU next month, appearing, as I’ve done the last several years, on the Chronicle’s Shark Tank: EDU Edition panel. It’s part of a full morning of programming that the Chronicle puts together. If SXSW EDU is a conference you attend, do get in touch (@jbj or my firstname.middleinitial.lastname at gmail) ! I’d love to chat.

A couple of things: I’ve never seen a full episode of the actual tv show, but the Chronicle’s edition is much less . . . skeevy, I think is the word. The reporters and editors spend the first several days of the conference talking to different people–presenters and attendees, vendors and faculty or administrators–and pull in several people to give very impromptu presentations about a problem facing higher ed, and how they propose to solve it. (Usually, but not always, the person does already have a solution in mind!) They then take questions from the panel–the Chronicle’s own Goldie Blumenstyk, me, and Paul Freedman, of Entangled Ventures–as well as the audience. Then, we each give, not exactly closing judgments, but certainly feedback about the project. It is a fun thing to do. You can see Goldie’s writeup of last year’s version here.

The other panel should also be good! They tweak its format each year, and this year’s focus on adult students should be interesting–especially at SXSW EDU, which has a strong K-12 component and so is often a bit youth-centric.

Hope to see you there! I might borrow the keys to the ProfHacker Instagram from George for that week, in order to give a bit of the flavor of the conference.

Photo “Austin Texas Skyline at Blue Hour by Flickr user Katie Haugland Bowen / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

(Audrey Watters’s 2013 edition of sxswEDU bingo is still weirdly accurate, even 5 years later.)