A Brief Report from South by Southwest edu
From Rick McMaster
I had the opportunity to attend SXSWedu in early March. There was a lot to absorb in the three days from the opening session on Monday afternoon to the closing keynote from Bill Gates on Thursday morning.

First, a little background... many people still think of SXSW as a music and film festival, but it has grown to be much, much more. The creative aspect is still very much in evidence throughout all parts of SXSW. SXSW Interactive is “an incubator of cutting-edge technologies and digital creativity”. Just a little more than three years ago, SXSWedu was spun out of SXSW Interactive to specifically address innovations in learning. SXSWedu has grown almost tenfold since it started at the AT&T Conference Center at The University of Texas at Austin in 2011.

The 2013 schedule included three keynotes, 14 distinguished speakers and more than 150 presentations and panel discussions on a wide range of topics in as many as 12 parallel sessions. The first challenge is always to choose among the many sessions. My personal “filter” included STEM, Personalized Learning, MOOCs and the Maker Movement. STEM was very evident with wonderful examples of best practices and lessons learned. Personalized learning was discussed in a number of panels with the general conclusion that we have the technology to support it but still need innovation and to gain experience through piloting.

MOOCs were probably among the most controversial topics and both Anant Agarwal of edX and Andrew Ng of Coursera shared their experiences and visions. There were arguments on both sides using the same data! Regardless of the position, a 10% completion rate on an initial enrollment of 50,000 still means that 5000 students made it the whole way through — students who might otherwise never have tackled the material. More interesting is to look at completion rates by week. There are a lot of people getting educated through MOOCs even if they don’t stay until the end. I am in week 9 of 10 of a Coursera class and will be happy to share my critique when I have completed it. I also had an interesting discussion with an educator from a rural district in Texas about her positive experience with distance learning on a different scale from MOOCs that I’ll share in another column.

I love the Maker Movement probably because I was part of it way before it was a movement. Arlo Guthie sang that if fifty people participate, “... friends they may think it's a movement”. So I’m sure 120,000 people attending a Maker Faire qualifies it as a movement. I personally feel that this has the potential for getting our K-12 students today excited and committed to STEM (and more). Next month I’ll go into my views in more detail about “Making STEM”. If you have thoughts on relating the Maker Movement and STEM, please send them to me to share.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the excellent talks, panels and presentations. Visit the SXSWedu 2013 web site to see videos and listen to podcasts of much of the content. Meet me there next year!

As always, your comments and suggestions for future columns are welcome, @drkold.

Rick McMaster is the STEM Advocate at IBM’s University Programs Worldwide.

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