Accelerating Change

This newsletter article from WCET came across my email this morning, and relates strongly to the presentation I did for the T&L conference. The main point is that higher ed is using technology, but not keeping up in terms of policy, pedagogy, and other needed changes that come along with the pervasiveness of connectivity. Add to this the notion of “technostress”: the anxiety that comes with knowing that we are not keeping up, or that somehow information is “out of our hands,” and we have a potent mix that reasoned minds need to grapple with. Short read and worth it:

Imagining Higher Education and Technology in a Time of Accelerating Change By Ellen D. Wagner, Director, Worldwide E-Learning, Adobe Systems, Inc.

http://wcet.informz.net/admin31/content/template.asp?sid=433&ptid=55&brandid=4147&uid=1003128802&mi=80671

New Approaches to Learning Technology

A presentation given at the 11th Annual Massachusetts Community College Conference on Teaching, Learning, and Student Development, Apr 11:

teachinglearningpresentation

Engaged Learning

I attended this conference on Fri, 11/9. It was pretty good as conferences go. I especially enjoyed the keynote address by George Kuh. He was both funny and informative, and, as one of the main movers behind NSSE and CCSSE, he had a lot of data at his fingertips. And those data show that students who are stimulated and engaged in learning, through learning communities, cooperative learning, and intensive faculty-student interaction, tend to stay in college and tend to be happier with that decision. So there it is, fairly obvious, right? But if your college/organization doesn’t have a culture of engagement, then, as Ed Schein has said for many years, it takes about 20 years to change that. Let’s see, at a community college with an average of 3-4 years for matriculated students to fulfill their degrees, that’s 5-6 generations of students. Any way to move that along? Yes, it’s called a parallel learning system, or in higher ed parlance, a pilot program. The theory is that you try

Metaphor

Beautiful, isn’t it? This was used at a collaborative learning seminar I led in 2002 as a metaphor for collaboration. The beauty of metaphor is that everyone sees a different aspect of the metaphoric relationship: the rowers’ different but essential roles in moving the boat forward; the journey that the boat represents as the path of the collaborative effort; the rowers lending their individual strength to the collective task… Metaphor appears to use a unique part of the brain, as

New system starting Monday?

When we think about introducing new technology, we have to think about the entire rollout process: overview sessions, training, making the case for adoption of the technology — what needs it fills, ongoing support. It’s surprising that in 2007 organizations are still plopping new software on peoples’ desktops and expecting them to use it. Crazy, right? If we were doing this “right,” the needs would be driving the selection of tools, and the tools would not be changing the way we work when the need has not been demonstrated. If an organization wants to reduce resistance to change, the first place to look would be in the areas of transparency and communication about change: why are we doing it? what’s in it for me? what effort will be expected from me?