faculty development session August 16, 2007

pressures involved with faculty and technology–the least reason has to do with student demographics. increased competition is high.

students view education as information delivery

Minn. offers a variety of programs and grants that go across a period of time. start small with a group that you’ll have success with, then go from there. Community is a large component–bill cox on faculty learning communities. Minn’s digital learning workshop breaks down to groups of 3-4 to meet through out the year, where they meet and present. faculty members work with each other across disciplines.

Staff, faculty need people who will help them.

Constant experiment, if faculty can embrace that, and engage in scholarship of teaching and learning, they build in feedback mechanism to respond on how well experiment is going.

Differences of faculty members at stages of career, they offer administrative sign off. programs there for junior faculty, with minimal requirements.

programmatic approach: form alliances and partnerships within constraints of staff, draw on faculty leads, enlist administrative support, align with intitutional strategies/initiatives, know your participants, target marking, motivation, design and implemt of SoTL way (Gillespie, 2002)

start small, have success and reflect back to the community

programs should have learning centered design, promote deep learning, integrate assessment and evaluation and respect and foster community (Bransford, 2001) At Minn. they make sure these principles are apparent in their programs.

They are not sure how to gauge long term results, but have developed a model and hope for more. context, input, process and product [cipp process].

library 2.0 session August 16, 2007

-brought in outside speakers, more across the board topics like changes in libraries

-blog that documents change

-people from other disciplines asked question “what do you want from your library.”

-hired consultant to write report, but problematic because that person was not library centric

-McMaster libraries did a 12 week training program, setting up local hosted wikis and blogs, becoming campus solution for that.

-http://www.blogwithoutalibrary.net/

facebook performance August 16, 2007

i just update my facebook profile about watching a performance about facebook. recursive? buzz word.

all about students grappling with the issues of privacy, communication and the perceptions that these profiles are private. also, making piles out single words like “undecided.”

relationships without relating? “aspiring to maximum comfort in any experience”

facebook has template changes–default questions can be changed–how do we get this information to students?

LOVE that performance was used as a communication vehicle in this symposium!! great discussion facilitators!!!

At Fall focus session, ELI in Boulder August 16, 2007

Speaker from UT Austin, Kathleen Tyner “how net savvy learners are transforming educational institutions.”

MTV study- teens adept at multitasking and filtering information

Literacy as extension of the intellect

Social networks- boys have more network friends

Levin, D. and Arafeh, S. The Widening Gap Between Internet Savvy Student and their Schools.

Students in K-12 have very restricted use of internet in schools, frustrating and limiting to them.

Students want cross platform access, ability to upload and download content. more integration of digital content into learning.

DML competition, MacArthur Foundation: http://www.dmlcompetetion.net/home.php

21st century literacy domains: reading/writing; listening/speaking; …; …

Students not only produce content but program

Literacy not easy to teach, varies from culture to culture, guarantees nothing, highly literate cultures have done terrible things, but it is a thresh hold forcivic/social participation.

mandala as theme for literacy universe.

How to extend the intellect, RFID–personal note, this stuff always scares me

Aesthetics, D media, time

Intertextuality

artistic process as non-narrative, remix culture is an old thing in the fine arts (yup–so 20th cent.)

My thoughts: okay, this is all great, but how is this changing education? Please address! The pieces have all been laid out well, but i want to know what’s happening now from there, where are we going next? are there any structures to follow? i know it’s hard to put things in concrete these days, better to stay open, but what is going on at UT to address this stuff?

Advocates Open, digital archives (thank you!)

advocates cross generational training…interesting.

redesign the built world (to correspond to the online world?)

Advice on the world, while reading advice on relationships June 8, 2007

I love to read Cary Tennis‘ advice column in salon.com. His observations on day-to-day anxieties of the creative class are well put and usually point out as to relate the person and problem in the bigger picture. This write up, brought on by a college student’s musings over the cool down period in his relationship with a girl, just said so much, to so many.

“I speak to you now in your capacity as a future member of America’s elite, for America’s elite needs now to turn away from dreams of empire, to turn away from dreams of personal excellence, which have become synonymous with dreams of empire, to turn away from dreams of self-perfection, which have become synonymous with the will to power and a master civilization, to turn away from our own perfect reflection and see instead how much damage our self-absorption is doing in the world, and not just physical damage but moral and intellectual damage too, as lies infect our promise.”

Open classrooms, source, information and conferences June 8, 2007

This year has been all about open. I think the term is being used a bit too lightly these days, and I understand it in the context of information and source code. I think flexible is a better way to approach conferences, classrooms and learning.

That said, we had Phillip Long from MIT here on May 8, discussing their approch to classrooms. At MIT they use “TEAL” classrooms to teach beginning level Physics classes as a part of the core curriculum. They redesigned the classrooms to address a high failure rate in the classroom. They addressed the user/students and came up with an open model, with much more multimedia and a redesigned curriculum focussed on group learning to bring about better grade results. It worked. One phrase I wrote down that stays with me is “circulation as glue.” The ability to freely navigate the space in time and physicality, as a part of curriculum i.e. availability to students 24/7. Also, planning around human interaction rather than specific needs.

How does this apply to me, I always think? The big piece of advice he gave was to “exploit transistions.” Now, he was speaking architecturally, of exploiting common areas, entrance ways in academic buildings to provide seating, wireless, etc. for impromtu studying, collaborations. I’m thinking, exploit the transition of my discipline. Art History has gone digital, professors are using digital images and projectors, with online study guides. BUT these behaviors mimick analog behaviors and do not go beyond. Librarians push to go beyond, with portal information pages, etc. but this just doesn’t seem to be reaching the classroom. I’m going to exploit the space of the old VR library and see what I can come up with…

Working through the Notebook June 7, 2007

When in DC, I went to the Hirshhorn show curated by John Baldessari. A lot of the works were of a spiritual nature, but having not read the gallery guide yet, I can’t do it justice. One work in particular really moved me though. I was not familiar at all with the artist, but loved the work. It was “Apparition of Danger” by Hyman Bloom (1952.) This is a much better write up on the show itself than I could ever muster, but I must do more research on the artist himself. And what a great concept for a show, collection building. To have an artist collect works around their own ideas. It’s a living exhibit.

Surface May 30, 2007

It’s about time. I sit here everyday, doing graphics stuff with a mouse. I think constantly, why am i not interacting directly with the screen? Yes, Microsoft is evil…but I do like this product. I see PILES of applications in education, particularly in art history/education for sure.

Let the backward blogging begin May 30, 2007

All year, I’ve kept a small notebook in my handbag, where I record my thoughts from conferences, speakers, art exhibits, etc. Okay, less art exhibits these days, sadly. At the beginning of May, I was in D.C. It was a rainy day to be batting around on the Mall, but we came upon a Wish Tree
at the Hirshhorn Museum and it stopped us in our tracks for a while. The tree itself had this transcendent beauty. But the wishes ranged from flippant to incredibly sad and drew us into this frenzy of reading, connecting us to people again. I read in the article linked above, that Yoko Ono whispered to these trees. I was reminded of old irish practice, where prayers are whispered to a tree and rags tied to the limbs, or pennies pounded in the branch as a physical counterpart to the prayer. Many of the wishes asked for an end to the war.

What I’ve taught and learned in 06/07 May 10, 2007

The school year is over. I’ve got piles of detritus all over my desk, piles of slides to file. I’ve got digital files across two server spaces and three desktops. I’m exhausted, out of shape and generally burnt. That said, my learning this year has been off-the-charts. I’ve been to some fabulous conferences, met some great people and seen a lot of ambitious projects in action. I always feel like we could be doing more here, but we’d have to have about 10 more people across ats and the libraries to develop on that scale I think. This is a good environment for incubation of ideas and collaboration outward.

After this school year, I’ve learned that I can no longer expect students to learn well in a traditional classroom setting. I’d been hearing this for a while, but finally witnessed it. During technology instruction, they were bored, distanced and alienated. I’ve seen it in their eyes, gestures and engagement levels. Particularly with technology, they don’t want learning experiences ahead of time, they want point-of-need, in quick, neat packages that they can get to quickly. And yesterday/today, I realized the same was true for me. I have finally “plugged in” enough that traditional learning doesn’t help me anymore. All I need is a chair, a laptop and wireless. I don’t want to be lectured to for 8 hours. Or even 4 hours. I want a more open environment, with the teacher as leader and participant rather than lecturer. My reaction at conferences to sessions was much the same. The content that I learned from at these venues came in quick flashes at poster sessions and 30 minute demos. The other routine I developed this year was to go hog wild with web 2.0 applications. I have regularly played on the directory with new sites. Even if they just last a little while, I may learn something from my information push and pull. Overall for me, the flexible framework of web 2.0 has transcended cyberspace and now exists in physical space. And I’m rarely in a physical space (i.e. building) without being plugged in. It’s outside (hiking, in my yard) that I escape the matrix by leaving mobile devices in the house. The quiet is refreshing for sure.

So, what am I going to do about this? Guest lectures for older students have to stay within traditional frameworks, but I can concentrate more on information chunks and develop tutorials around the chunks. For these learners, quick and fast classroom demos work, because I allow them to grab onto what they need and get back to the chunks via tutorials. Secondly, I’ll follow UNC’s lead and place tutorial for students on course sites–that will solve that problem and save me a lot of time. The thing is removes for me is visibility with the students. But I think this “less is more” attitude will allow me to be more organized and focused as well.

The last piece of the puzzle is my own academic work. How can I do that in the context of more traditional disciplines like art history? I’m not sure yet, but hopefully I’ll get a chance at SECAC this fall. And what do lighter, flexible models do for instructional design? I’m not sure again, that’s more fodder for late afternoon walks this summer.