Techfoot

Last week I spent two full days in sessions of the University Teaching Project in preparation for a new partnership at William and Mary focused on using the best combination of traditional and emerging technologies available to broaden and deepen the conversation about excellent teaching. IT’s academic information services staff will be working closely with the Roy Charles Center–the nerve center for WM’s interdisciplinary programs, competitive scholarships, University Teaching Project and the Sharpe Community service program. As a result, the Charles Center is the home of some of the most interesting programs focused on expanding the range of teaching and learning at the College, and dozens of faculty members are working on projects to make learning even more interactive, integrative and imaginative.

We’ve worked closely with the folks at the Charles Center on a number of initiatives, including one focused on understanding the process of undergraduate research, and we’ve laid the groundwork even more expansive projects in the future. The grand plan for the next two years calls for our group to focus the time and resources that we’d been investing in the former Technology Integration Program on expanding the reach of the University Teaching Project. Our efforts in creating TIP had some very real successes, but we never achieved the kind of seamless integration that we had hoped for.

In practical terms, we’re going to help develop a fully interactive web site that fosters communications and consolidates resources about teaching in a common location. We know that teaching is highly valued at WM, but a visitor from Mars would have to look pretty hard for evidence of our commitment. Efforts at teaching improvement have generally been highly personal and private–shared only with a few close colleagues and department members. Our goal is to keep the support for grassroots efforts at teaching improvement, closely tied to the individual classroom, while publicizing some of successes so that others can build on them. In the early stages of the project, we’ll focus on listening, gathering information and trying to understand what the teaching community of practice is really like.

We’re optimistic about the potential value of this partnership because of the strong alignment between our way of working in the academic computing group and that of Joel Schwartz, Dean of Interdisciplinary Studies:

I am a catalyst,” he said. “What a good teacher does is kind of catalyze thinking and productivity in students. Teaching is not something in which you have a student sit at your feet while you dispense wisdom down to them and they soak it into their heads. You try to help them become original, creative people.” (link)

Links

University Teaching Project

Saint Richard (Dick) Bolles, author of What Color is Your Parachute and founder of the concept of “life-work designing” suggests that one key step in preparing for an uncertain future is to sit down at the end of each week and answer one fundamental question: “what have I done this week that added more value to my organization than I took away from it?

As fallible human beings, all of us will have weeks when we take away more than we give, but if that becomes a pattern, we’re in danger of either losing our jobs or wasting our lives in doing work that’s not really meaningful to us. Saint Richard believes that if we find ourselves in that situation we either change the way we do our jobs or that we change the jobs themselves. (We’ve seen several of our colleagues in the blogosphere make those kinds of changes over the last year or so.)

One of the hardest things for those of us in the academic IT world is to figure out actual value we add to our institutions. In some strategic planning work that I’m doing, we’re trying to identify a few fundamental questions that we think need to be addressed by the institution in evaluating the importance of technology in teaching and learning. Here’s one of the first that I’m proposing:

Ongoing studies by the Pew, Kaiser and MacArthur foundations suggest that students entering our colleges today bring fundamentally different expectations, thinking styles–even basic literacies–than generations before. To what extent to you agree with that assertion?

As I’ve been raising that question with colleagues, responses have ranged from “Duh” to “Poppycock”–though most are quick to identify at least surface changes in classroom behavior, etiquette or expectations. Few are as convinced that these changes are as essential or significant as some of us in the technology arena believe they are. One potentially fruitful area of conversation is to try to come to some common understanding of the types of shifts we’re seeing in the capability of our students and the magnitude of those changes.

All of us have certain words we’d rather not hear:

“Hi Dad, I’m using my one phone call…”

“I think it’s important that you get to the cardiologist’s office this afternoon…”

“Um, about that money you invested with Bernie Madoff….”

I’ve added the following:

“I gave him the url to your blog….”

I still believe that all of us who claim to be students of the digital world need to continue participate in the conversation in that world, but my blog itself certainly doesn’t inspire much confidence in my ongoing activity as a an active learner/teacher and citizen of the digital universe. Those of us who have participated long enough in this exercise called blogging know that there is an ebb and flow to it–a time to write and a time to refrain from writing. The secret is knowing the difference.

When you physically cringe when someone says, “I gave him the URL to your blog” it’s time to write again.