Mid-South Instructional Technology Conference
Teaching, Learning, & Technology
The Challenge Continues
March 30-April 1, 2003
2003 Featured Speakers
- Mark Valenti, President, The Sextant Group, Inc.
- Don Buckley, Associate Professor of Biology & Director of Instructional Technology, Quinnipiac University (Banquet Speaker, March 31)
- Sally M. Johnstone, Director, WCET (Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications)
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Mark Valenti
President
The Sextant Group
Emerging Technologies and the New Learning Space
Proceedings
(PDF, 2MB)
Monday, March 31
8:15 a.m.
KUC Theatre
ABSTRACT
The convergence of emerging technologies and new developments in cognitive science offers opportunity to rethink the learning space. However, the long design-to-construction cycle typical of most college and university facilities may span two or more generations of technology. Meanwhile, changes in instructional delivery and curriculum design may span a generation of people.
While we can't design for a future that we can't yet see, is it possible to use design principles so that our buildings and facilities aren't obsolete once built? Does this have implications for infrastructure planning, and even instructional design? If students will be wearing mobile, wireless Internet appliance, and their bodies are network connections, what does that mean for building, classroom, and lab design? If students expect to learn in a collaborative, team-based environment, what infrastructure (facilities, equipment, software) will they require from the university?
Mark Valenti, President of The Sextant Group, a leading consulting firm in higher education facility and technology systems design, shares his perspectives on emerging technologies and their implications for higher education. He will describe projects currently in design and under construction, and how some of these design principles are already being applied.
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Don Buckley
Associate Professor of Biology & Director of Instructional Technology
Quinnipiac University
Teaching With Technology So Students Learn With Understanding
PowerPoint Presentation
(3.03 MB)
Monday, March 31
7 p.m.
Garden Plaza Hotel
ABSTRACT
Throughout history, educators have had to rely on metaphors to describe how they believed people learned and to guide them in the teaching process because the understanding of cognitive development of learning was very limited. Today, education stands on the threshold of a new frontier made possible by recent and monumental advances in knowledge of how the brain functions in learning. This is a historic change.
Despite aggressive advocacy for teaching reform by influential leaders and educational communities, higher education’s transition from the instructional paradigm (focusing on content delivery) to the new learning paradigm (emphasizing learning with understanding) has not progressed very far. The most critical bottleneck may be the conservative nature of faculty cultures. Faculty communities are a paradox. Faculty members are content experts, but teaching well requires more than content knowledge. They have been trained in critical inquiry, but to a large extent epistemologies are contingent on their content area and do not provide much guidance about how people learn and how they might teach more effectively. Most educators were trained as researchers, with little formal training in teaching or in the cognitive development of learning. Faculty cultures often don’t encourage or reward deep faculty development in teaching, so most teach the way they were taught and emerging insights about how people learn may diffuse only slowly into general practice. Teaching innovation is certainly not new and higher education is blessed with a bounty of gifted educators, yet the history of teaching reform is replete with examples of wonderful successes that failed to transform their communities. Too often successful projects begin and remain insular, and thereby transient.
Instructional technology has been touted as a tool to improve education, and systemic integration of technology is a major goal of most colleges and universities. However, much faculty development with technology is not transformational and does not alter practice in a meaningful way. Improving a lecture with technology may not help a student to move from passive to active learning. Moreover, the pedagogical potential of instructional technology is best suited to learning-centered teaching styles and it may be mismatched with much current faculty practice. Placing learning-centered technology in the hands of faculty under-prepared to exploit its potential will produce disappointing results. Promoting enduring changes in faculty practice will require transformational faculty development experiences, coupled with effective institutional change processes, all focused on the goal of teaching so that students learn with understanding.
There will be a challenging trade-off. Effective institutional transition to the learning paradigm will require reward and faculty development systems that are transformational enough to produce changes in practice, but scalable enough to achieve systemic change.
Buckley earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Botany, Ohio University in 1986. He joined the University of Hartford in 1990 after completing a visiting assistant professorship at Tufts University and a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University. In addition to his research interests in the evolution of plant genetic systems, his pedagogical scholarship has focused on student-centered and inquiry-oriented learning in undergraduate science education, with special attention to the role of educational technology in the learning paradigm. Buckley is also an author of numerous interactive multi-media learning environments. His teaching was recognized in a faculty profile in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1996. In 1997, he received a University of Hartford Harry Jack Gray Outstanding Teacher of the Year award. In 1999, Buckley became chair of the Teaching Section of the Botanical Society of America. The same year, he moved to Quinnipiac University as an associate professor of biology and as the director of learning technology for the School of Health Sciences. Since then, Buckley has been named an Apple Distinguished Educator twice, a Computerworld Smithsonian Laureate, and nominated Quinnipiac University Outstanding Faculty of the Year. In 2001, he was one of six national finalists for biology program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Undergraduate Education.
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Sally M. Johnstone
Founding Director
Western Cooperative for
Educational Telecommunications (WCET)
Implications of the Trends in Distributed Learning Activities
Tuesday, April 1
8:15 a.m.
KUC Theatre.
ABSTRACT
When distance learning began to shift to an on-line environment, the audience for these services shifted as well. In many colleges and universities, the on-line students are also on campus. This trend is pushing campuses to do many things differently. It is also opening higher education resources to the world. Sally Johnstone will offer her interpretation of these trends and share some new projects that may have profound effects on U.S. higher education.
The WCET staff develops research projects focusing on state and institutional issues resulting from the integration of technology into the teaching and learning processes; consults with higher education institutions; holds professional development institutes for practitioners; publishes timely reports, and generally supports its members in the planning for and implementation of distributed learning.
Johnstone's special areas of expertise include: the effects of the integration of technology on higher education institutions and system organizations, quality assurance issues, project development and evaluation, the international community and generally supporting WCET members in the planning for and implementation of distance learning.
Johnstone serves on the Board of the American Association of Higher
Education (AAHE), the U. S. Open University's Board of Directors, and
the Advisory Panel for the Consortium for the Advancement of Private Higher
Education. She writes a monthly column on distance learning for Syllabus
magazine, serves as a consulting editor for Change magazine, and has authored
about 20 articles, four book chapters and five books/major reports on
distance and distributed learning. She also leads workshops and gives
about a dozen invited addresses each year to higher education organizations.
She earned her Ph. D. in experimental psychology from the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
http://www.wcet.info/resources/StaffPresentations/implications_trends_files/frame.htm