I’ve known since the middle of March that I would be presenting at InstCon and it was a mix of excitement and nervousness ever since. I’m done with my presentation now and feel relieved!
I had some great questions after my presentation and eight or so people hung around to talk. There even might be some very strong opportunities to collaborate with folks from Dartmouth and elsewhere! So, it was a success for that alone.
The presentation was rough at times because I haven’t presented before at this conference. I generally like to go to a conference first to get to know the culture and audience before preparing to present, but that wasn’t the case this year. At other times, I felt very comfortable and right-at-home with the audience of about 60 people.
While the recording for the conference will not be available for a few more weeks, I do have a link to the presentation that basically contains a transcript of the presentation. It turns out that not many presentations I saw included the “Spy Theme” that the conference was based on. Mine was heavily based on Mission: Impossible, but I think it worked since it fit the content of my presentation so closely.
Overall, I would say that I very much enjoyed this conference. The sessions were very good and I hope to watch some of the ones I missed once they post the videos. There was one in particular on Canvas Blueprints that I wanted to see, but I know those materials will be available later.
I was interested to hear about two things. The first is that Canvas is designed to be good around a number of core functionality features, but leaves openings for others to integrate LTIs (and APIs?). The second is that Canvas relies on a group of the forty most active Canvas Community members to decide where a significant portion – 16,000 hours, of their development resources are spent over the course of a year.
Regarding the first insight, this might explain the “85% feeling” I’ve had since I started working with Canvas. I’ve kept thinking, “they really have this down 85% of the way there, but it would be nice if they also had…” I’m not sure this is an accurate representation, but I’m not sure I agree that they expect people to develop LTIs to take Canvas “the last mile.”
I have a bigger potential issue with the “40” decision-making model. I admit that I have no idea how they chose the 40, but I sure do have a lot of questions. Are these people chosen because they have the most posts in the Community? What skill sets do they have to drive the future of the development of Canvas? Does Penn State and other Unizen partners have any say in this process? I have not hear of other software companies using this approach, but I do not know anything about the software industry. I just though it was odd.
In the end, I still very much support Canvas and think they are doing very good things for our community of students, faculty, staff and admins. I’m looking forward to going again and being more relaxed either as a participant or a presenter.