Our Keynote Speaker:
Our Keynote Speaker is Keith Fowlkes, Executive Director of The HESS Consortium. He will be speaking on “Virtual Learning Environments: How the metaverse could profoundly affect higher education.”
Keith Fowlkes is a 25+-year veteran chief information officer serving as CIO for Saint Mary’s College – Notre Dame, IN, University of Virginia at Wise and Centre College. He has also taught in most of his institutions in the area of business and computer science. He is vice president of the technology contracts practice for E&I Cooperative Services in Jericho, NY. He is the executive director, co-founder and board member of the Higher Education Systems & Services Consortium (HESS Consortium – www.hessconsortium.org). Keith is also a frequent speaker and has served as a contributing writer on technology for EDUCAUSE, Campus Technology, InformationWeek and the ACUTA Journal. He has a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Tennessee at Martin, a Master degree in Information Systems and an M.B.A. in Economics and Finance from Webster University in St. Louis, MO.
Our Keynote Topic:
Virtual Learning Environments: How the metaverse could profoundly affect higher education
The concept of immersive virtual environments is not a new idea but today, developments in virtual reality and artificial intelligence are revealing new possibilities in education. Now, with the emergence of lower cost, higher definition virtual reality hardware and software, what is being called the metaverse today could have wide ranging affects on higher education. This presentation will be a future look at how high speed networks, virtual reality and artificial intelligence technologies could likely change the way we look at education, academia and our world culture in the not-so-distant future.