ELCC 2017 Conference
A real beneficial use of 3D Printing still seems to be a mystery even to some institutions who have invested substantial money, time, and resources to the search. There is always the example of the prosthetic program for kids who have had amputations, but scant few well known examples beyond that. At the ELCC conference  Robin Weber from UNC presented her college's efforts 3D printing an while interesting I don't see where that university has even come close to recovering its investment.

What she offered as examples of their output fit in a quart sized ziploc and largely amounted to toys. The few items that users had paid them to produce included four plastic Hindu type elephants with articulated legs and model of a medieval  baptismal font that might work with the Guinevere Barbie Knights of the Round Table play set.

Robin did share a lot of discoveries that would be useful to anyone who was actively engaged in working with 3D printing such as effectiveness of materials, costs, practical planning in terms of time and maintaining equipment, but she ended it with the same question that I've heard at every 3D print presentation I've ever attended which is "So do you have any ideas on how we can use this technology in the academic setting?".

This technology which seems like a perfect fit with academics still struggles to find a need. I think that if an institution had an engineering program a 3D Printing lab would be very busy, but in absence of that, everyone keeps asking the same question what do we do with it?

More practical, Dave Thomas of CU Denver shared an amazing road map for transitioning to a new LMS. Specifically CU-D went to Canvas, and on an aside, while not a salesman for Canvas, Thomas couldn't say enough good about it.

The presentation was not a gloom and doom everything that could possibly go wrong did typical LMS migration story. Thomas admitted there was a lot of work and some things they could have done better, but a well planned path resulted in a successful migration. While Regis is not planning [to my knowledge] to leave D2L, if we ever started down that path I would suggest we reach out to Dave and his team for advice.