This panel discussion, "
Introducing New Technology to Faculty" offers some meaningful ways to think about the relationship between technology and the teaching and learning enterprise. Concepts that stood out for me included:
- @ 3:00 - Lead with learning goals, not with technology.
This fits well with some recent discussions I've had with colleagues about planning for a new learning space.
Phil Long visited Baylor this week. At lunch on Monday, he reminded us to think about "verbs" as the starting point for design - that is, what do we want students to do/learn/accomplish in the space? By starting with the verbs we will find that sometimes technology is not the answer (@ 24:30). The alternative, in my mind, is that the technology tail wags the classroom design dog.
- @ 24:55 - "Instruction is such a loaded term," perhaps we should talk about "learning design" rather than "instructional design" (there was not a consensus on this idea on the panel).
The change in language makes sense to me, at least if we are talking about a learner-centered, rather than an instructor-centered, mode.
- @ 35:00 - Access to information is cheap or free (the speaker obviously has not seen the bill from [insert name of any major STM publisher here]!), and the technology is not so complicated. The real challenge is making the information useful.
This again returns to the point about starting with the learning process, and addressing the affordances needed once you know what you want students to accomplish. There is, of course, some iterative aspect to this process. Someone in the instructional planning process needs to know what technology is available, or at least have some grammar for imagining the tools that might be useful.
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