“My Take” on MCUAV 2023 with James King
“My Take” on MCUAV 2023 with James King
By: James King
The MCUAV Summit V.9 was a great event. This year’s summit was held at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. The event started on Thursday night with a behind the scenes of the Pablo Center at the Confluence. This tour was informative and we got to see how a project can look when it is well planned out. The amount of detailed planning that went into that building did not just set it up to be a great venue but also set it up to grow and scale. After the tour everyone went out for social time. It was nice to see friends in-person again as well make new connections. I have not been to an in-person AV event since InfoComm 22.
The next morning everyone gathered in the main room for the welcoming remarks and the keynote. I was the keynote speaker. This was the first time I was presenting in front of all my peers let alone doing a keynote. To say I was nervous was an understatement. As I got going with my presentation, the nerves went away and I got into the groove. I was talking about something I knew and was being true to who I was. I was talking about why it was important to build community. Did it go as I planned? No, but as the saying goes the audience never knows what you planned. Once I was done I was amazed by the feedback I got.
After the keynote everyone broke out into sessions. There were three sessions going on at the same time. I went to the session on “Immersive Learning in Health Science Classes”. This session was being done by the team from Bluum Technologies. What I liked about this session was it was less about talking and more about interactions. They did a quick overview of the products and talked about immersive technology that is making tracks in the medical field. After this quick overview they allowed everyone to interact with three different types of gear. They had their Bluum Anatomy Table and two different types of VR headsets. It was good to put hands on the equipment and take them for a spin. It is easy to get lost in the details but being able to hear the details and then putting hands on the product gave a better understanding how they could fit in an environment.
Lunch was after the first break-out sessions and then everyone went to the two remaining break-out sessions. I did a session on why it is important to have an in-house programmer. This session was less about a presentation and more of a discussion. As a group we talked about pain points we have with programming and talked about how having an in-house programmer could help with these. Yes we also did talk about the cons as well.
The last break-out session I attended was the Managing Your Team of Students where Rodney Fillmore, Noah Holm, and Joe Way lead a discussion on student workers. The group was a mix of schools with different size teams. Some ranging from 130 student workers to others with a handful. Even though we all have different numbers of student workers we all face the same challenges of preparing them to provide the level of support our end users need while also preparing the student workers for when they enter the real world. We talked about how we handle training, how we handle motivating, and even got down to details as to how we communicate with our student workers.
Overall I felt the summit was a great event. Events like this remind me that in higher education our schools might be different sizes, our teams might be different sizes, and our budgets might be different but we all face similar challenges. Not only do we face similar challenges but we also all have the same goal which is to make sure our classrooms are providing the education that our students come to expect. Another great take away from a show like this is the size. This was a local show so the footprint was much smaller than a show like InfoComm. Even though it was smaller, the connections and the lesions were just as valuable. It also made it easier to connect with everyone there.
