Presentation on Millennials

Oops, I have this on my passport : will post shortly!

Here is the pdf:

teachingacrossthegenerations

The Road Taken #1

I was telling a colleague today that I had been working with/for/on/in technology for 22 years. Taking a ride in the way-back machine however, I realized that I worked with technology in my first real professional job — read on..

A friend of the family had gotten me a job at Hall & McChesney in Syracuse New York. H & M was one of those early computer firms who were involved in contracts for computerizing county land documents. So, first there were microfiche, which were a kind of laminate sheet on which a copy of records was kept. The next phase was “punch cards.” There used to be a job called “keypunch operator” – person who produced punch cards, and then the punch cards were fed into a large computer, and voila – hundreds of records could be stored on computer tape. But I digress. My job at M & H was to take printouts of county land deeds and proofread them for accuracy – very, very boring. But I was good at it, so I was deemed to have “potential” – whatever that meant! Iwas invited to work extra hours on Saturdays, where my job was to feed stacks of punch cards into the computers, and then change the tapes when they were full.

In a room like this — very noisy! The tapes probably held 64K of memory – unbelievable in a terabyte-soon-to-be-petabyte world. That was it – not sure I reached my potential, as I only lasted  a few months there. But I often wonder – if I had stayed, what road would I have taken?

Eportfolio and culture quandary

The eportfolio project marches on. Am using the Chalk & Wire product – a very powerful assessment engine. It is interesting how technology tools become the fulcrum of culture change. What I mean is: because eportfolio allows a fine-grained assessment of student work based on a rich mix of learning expression: reflection, expository writing, film, audio, visual art, etc. — the system is challenged to provide that level of assessment – basically forcing one up the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy and away from testing and an overwhelming emphasis on summative assessment (=the final: either you got the whole point of the course or you didn’t – and it’s too late to do anything about it!). At the same time, the tools shouldn’t drive the culture change.. then why does it end up so often doing just that ???

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