Techfoot

Back when I was in journalism school–writing my stories for Daily Texan on a IBM Selectric–everyone was expected to develop a “beat“. Your beat might be the night court and police station, the athletic complex, the theaters, or some other part of the institution that you knew better anyone else in the newsroom. Your goal as a beat reporter was to build up a base of knowledge and a web of contacts that allowed you to uncover news that others might miss. (For a while there actually was a Pulitzer prize for “Beat Journalism”.)

Faculty bloggers don’t have formal beats the way that news reporters do, but we do have areas of the college that we have inside and specialized knowledge about. Some of those are formal and tied to our jobs–I think a lot about emerging technology, classroom design, project management and learning theory because my understanding of those topics shape the decisions that I have to make every day.

My “beat” also includes lots of contacts in lots of places that aren’t tied directly to the job. I spend about six hours a week on the Arc Trainer at the Rec Center, some quality time on path or in the halls chatting with other social scientists and a little time most days at the Daily Grind. Those non-work related contacts provide some of the most interesting insights into life at William and Mary, like this one overheard at the Daily Grind.

Student A: One thing I want to be sure to do while I’m here is to take a class from Scott Nelson.

Student B: He’s great. When I grow up, I want to be like Scott Nelson.

Student C: That’s nothing. When I die, I want to come back as Scott Nelson.

Learning from Scott Nelson, priceless--Scott, his book and the Boss.

In preparing for a presentation on course planning for Blackboard last week, I came upon a great course design tip sheet at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard. The sheet begins with a couple of general questions and suggests that teachers not think specific content until after they have thought carefully about their overall purpose and about the expectations, capabilities and needs of their students. Hidden in the midst of that checklist was a question that has really captured my interest: “What’s the story line for this course?”

I’d never thought of my courses as having “story lines”, but they clearly do. The story is what pulls the disparate activities, topics and conversations of a course into a meaningful whole. Each participant constructs an individual narrative that persists long after the “facts” and much of “the content” is forgotten. The story weaves the actions, reactions, motivations, emotions, thoughts and behaviors into an unique experience with the capacity to shape participants as active creators of our own learning. As teachers we don’t control the entire story, but we do get to shape it somewhat by the activities we choose and by the way we interact with our students.

When we look back at the learning that has been most significant in our own lives, we generally relate our experience as narrative. As Gardner wrote about Professor Elizabeth Phillips:

I remember the room where I first heard her speak.  No one in my immediate family had been to college. I had no idea what to expect. After that class, I left the room feeling dizzy, giddy, elated, and not a little anxious, for everything had changed, and I knew I had to at least try to be answerable to that revelation.

All of my classes have a common story line. My goal in the 15 weeks we’re together is to help all of us learn how to learn more effectively. The central issue is developing new flexibility and capacity in learning; content provides the tools by which we develop those capacities. As the catalog outlines in the emerging technology class, we’ll be thinking, talking and writing about a variety of topics including past innovations, present applications, and future advances in educational technology. We’ll look at these topics through multiple theoretical lenses, including change theories, diffusion of innovations, and learning theories. But the ultimate story of the courses goes far beyond that–at least I hope it will.

My goal in designing the course is to prepare educators who are confident in their ability to navigate in a world that is increasingly dominated by information technology. If we’re successful, we’ll be more prepared as teachers and administrators to help our own students deal with increasing pace of change in their lives. Some of the themes that I expect to emerge during my next class include ways that we can help students:

• Manage their participation in government so that their rights to privacy, security and access to information are protected from both government agencies and corporate interests.
• Keep personal information management skills up-to-date so that they can continue to be employable in a rapidly changing economy.
• Manage their personal information both at home and at work to protect themselves—data, passwords, and personal identity—from intrusion and damage.
• Use technology to overcome parochialism to become more active and effective citizens.

This has all the potential for a fascinating story.

This is the point in the year when many of us in the academic community begin to think really seriously about time. When “the summer” began last May, there seemed to be plenty of time to complete our projects, however optimistic or unrealistic our expectations. Now with 5 days to go before our faculty orientation time doesn’t look the same. My project list is longer than it was when I started, and my conversations on the path with others suggest that I’m not alone.

This summer, these final reflections on my time and how I invested it have been inescapably colored by the death of Randy Pausch, a man I never met but who I feel I know somewhat through the miracle of the internet. Last night I watched parts the “nuts and bolts” presentation on time management he did at UVA and thought about what a gift it was to be reminded of the importance of the individual decisions we make every day about meetings, phone calls, email and the other things that shape our lives.

We’re doing an experiment in the next month to track how those of us in the Academic Information Services group spend actually spend invest our time. Just a few days into the project, it’s already clear how extraordinarily difficult it is to try to focus energy and time on things that are important. Over the years, we’ve filled our lives with actions and decisions and habits that probably need to change to deal with the realities of our work lives now. Change of this magnitude is always tough, but letting others determine the directions of our lives is tougher in the long term.