Ohio Centers for Learning and Technology

The Ohio Learning Network has published a list of the academic centers throughout Ohio that focus on teaching and learning though technology. In Northeast Ohio, there are technology/learning/teaching centers at

• Case Western Reserve University (The University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education)
• Cleveland State University (University Center for Teaching and Learning)
• John Carroll University (Center for Teaching and Learning)
• Kent State University (Faculty Professional Development Center),
• Kent State University (Research Center for Educational Technology)
• Lakeland Community College (Excellence in Teaching Committee)
• Lorain County Community College (Center for Teaching Excellence)
• Notre Dame College (The Center for Professional Development)
• Oberlin College (Center for Technologically Enhanced Teaching)
• University of Akron (The Institute of Teaching and Learning)
• YSU Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning at Youngstown State (CATALYST)

Also on the OLN site are some resources for professional development that appear to be very useful for self-education. The TeachU initiative offers webinars for educators. These webinars focus on emerging technologies and how to integrate them into pedagogy that will enhance student learning.

Centers of Excellence in Teaching and Learning throughout the USA

Gannon University provides yearly seminars for small groups of faculty to explore new applications of technology for enhanced learning through their Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning


From the website of the Center for Technology in Learning and Teaching at Iowa State University: "More than a physical space, the Center for Technology in Learning and Teaching (CTLT) is a community comprised of a collegial, collaborative group of faculty, staff, graduate, and undergraduate students who have created a learning environment that continually demonstrates powerful applications of technology that improve student learning."

Indiana University's Center for Research on Learning and Technology is focused on organizing and analyzing data regarding the ways in which appropriate technology can enhance learning and teaching.

At Rice University, the more than decade-old Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning
offers many past and current projects relating to an array of disciplines and to many different age groups. Most of what is displayed are links to the resources that the Center has developed through the years.

Washington State University's Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology offers a great page about ePortfolios. The WSU Center mentions their focus on faculty support first, stating that they are a resource for "everyone teaching at WSU". This primary focus on faculty support is clearly based on a desire to expand learning capabilities for students.

Tension between IT and Faculty

One of the challenges to envisioning a Web 2.0 focus is pushback that can occur from faculty. Especially at smaller institutions, many instructors are overtaxed in their teaching and administrative duties. Asking faculty to adopt new technologies into their pedagogy is asking them to significantly increase a workload that is already heavy....And the result can be that if and when these overtaxed faculty members do need to use some form of technology in the classroom, the IT department handles it.

At small schools, this IT department may simply be an IT person, who must support students, faculty and staff in understanding and effectively using any and all technology tools. Thus, this IT person is also overtaxed.

Luke Fernandez contributed an interesting article to EduCause Quarterly, "An Antidote to the IT - Faculty Divide", about the relationship - often strained - between IT staff and faculty. I do not completely agree with Fendandez, particularly in his concluding recommendation that IT people need to reach out to faculty more. Particularly at a very small college where there is only one IT person, this places a huge amount of effort on one end. In truth, everyone needs to be persuaded that Web 2.0 technologies are really not that scary or difficult to use, and that these technologies-moderately easy to adapt to - are essential to student success in the 21st Century.

But I want to highlight one of Fernandez's thoughts in particular because it does not, I believe, reflect this school's situation:

Fernandez writes that "From the point of view of many faculty, the growth of IT more often advances the interests and market-oriented perspectives of the administration, solidifying and securing the powers of the administration over faculty and narrowing faculty's ability to teach with a modicum of autonomy. Rather than fostering a spirit of free inquiry and creativity, IT seems complicit in the promotion of "factory" models of education where innovation and exploration are sacrificed to automation, efficiency, and the codification of standardized business processes."

If technology is embraced by all, if learning communities are formed for faculty members who are experimenting with technology, if the IT person is invited to/included in faculty committees and meetings, if the IT person is seen as more than someone with a set of skills and instead as a mentor to faculty members.....then the inclusion of technology will not, perhaps, be so fraught with tension.

Recently launched site offers support for instructors

The Social Media Classroom site offers helpful information for looking at

• specific classroom tools that we should be looking into: integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting
• how the use of these tools can enhance learning and help to reposition the student's experience from receiver of information to participatory seeker and creator of information
• how Web 2.0 tools are a rich extension of the best elements of traditional classroom methods, particularly those that are valued here: collaboration and self-expression

In order to access the repository of resources for educators, one needs a login ID and password.

Training in Web 2.0 for Higher Ed

This is perhaps a taste of what we have been looking for, from the Higher Education 2.0 Blog:

Training modules for using Web 2.o in the college classroom!

This resource can help us to understand what it is we should know and students should know...not an end in and of itself, but a helpful resource for defining our needs: podcasting, blogging, using wikis, and general conceptual frameworks for these tools.

Ideas to consider in Planning Professional Development

Interesting ideas for thinking about professional development, from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching :

From Special Occasion to Regular Work
For the past several years the Carnegie Foundation has been working with a group of California community colleges to improve student success in pre-collegiate math and English. One of the themes that has emerged as central in this effort—which we call Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges, or SPECC—is the need for different ways to think about and conduct professional development.
Part of what needs to be different is language. Though most educators aspire to be life-long learners and to improve in the various facets of their professional work, being "developed" is not an altogether appealing prospect. For starters, it sounds like something that happens to you; even worse, there's a sense that something's broken and needs to be fixed. In contrast, many of the SPECC [Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges] sites have adopted the language of "faculty inquiry," pointing toward a process that begins with the questions that good, thoughtful teachers have, and need to understand more fully, about their own students' learning. In this spirit, SPECC campuses have created Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs) that illustrate powerful professional growth and learning characterized by three key principles.
First, opportunities for teachers to grow and develop must be sustained over time. Professional development often takes the form of one-time workshops and presentations by outside speakers that may or may not be related to the campus's goals for student learning. SPECC participants have been energetic in pointing out the limitations of this model. "We believe that the one-hour, lunch-time faculty development workshop has little impact on the transformation of faculty attitudes and behavior," one campus team reported. In contrast, they noted that their work in the Carnegie project "has taught us that if we are serious about making radical changes to the way we deliver instruction, we must work intensively with a select group of faculty over an extended period of time." Some FIGs established in SPECC have continued for more than a year now.
A second principle is the importance of collaboration. One of the most persistent impediments to educational improvement is that teachers have—because institutions provide—so few purposeful, constructive occasions for sharing what they know and do. Thus, one of the most important moves a campus can make is to create occasions for educators to talk, to find colleagues, to be part of a community of practice. As an administrator at Merced College remarked during a SPECC site visit, "Good things happen when teachers talk."
Of course talk is not enough, and not all talk is created equal. With this in mind, some campuses have worked their way toward carefully structured routines and protocols for collaboration. At Los Medanos College, for instance, a group of English instructors organized themselves as a kind of graduate seminar, with clear tasks in preparation for each meeting and an emphasis on developing new tools and materials—course assignments, for instance, and assessment instruments. At City College of San Francisco, several faculty groups employ a carefully structured process of classroom observation, which is then grist for discussion during their meetings.
The third defining feature is a focus on evidence about student learning. SPECC campuses have served as laboratories for exploring how to bring different kinds and levels of evidence more effectively to bear on the improvement of teaching and learning.

From The International Society for Technology in Education

The National Educational Technology Standards for Students offer a technology-centered outline for what our 21st century students need to learn and apply. This list provides details for enhancing the 21st century skill set with technology.

Of equal importance are the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers, which offer a basic framework for planning professional development goals and assessing professional development success.

Professional Development for 21st century Skills- technology

• The Partnership for 21st Century Skills published an e-paper outlining basic strategies and benchmarks for professional development . This paper refers to P16 educators, and often indicates a focus on teacher training. However, the basics are useful.

• From Digital Learning Environments : ideas on grant seeking and professional development planning
  



• Professional Development offered in Missouri by eMINTS (the instructional model focuses on connecting inquiry, community, high quality lesson design, technology and evaluation)




• Alan McCord offers the followng consideration: While formal training can improve faculty attitudes toward technology, it is most effective in practical terms when comprehensively delivered and accompanied by incentives (Gilmore 1998). For this reason an understanding of what motivates faculty to use online instruction as well as what inhibits such use should inform a training protocol. Maguire (2005) identifies three forms of motivation that influence faculty in their decisions regarding the use of online teaching resources:
  - Intrinsic motivators involve personal attitudes affecting technology adoption.
  - Extrinsic motivators incorporate incentives such as promotion, tenure, and opportunities for collaboration with other faculty.
  - Institutional motivators appeal to potential users by means of the support, compensation, release time, and recognition made available by the university.
  While Maguire (Maguire, L. 2005. Literature review—Faculty participation in online distance education: Barriers and motivators. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration 8) argues that positive extrinsic and institutional motivators may outweigh negative intrinsic motivators, she also notes that developers of online programs should understand that faculty may experience extrinsic and institutional motivation as a type of peer pressure. If reluctant faculty members feel compelled to incorporate technology, they might experience less satisfaction with their instructional experience and higher rates of burnout (Beam and Kim 2002). Special care should be taken to provide additional support to faculty who participate in online teaching because of a perceived pressure to participate(This article was originally published in Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/) as McCord, A. 2006. Staffing and supporting a new online initiative. Innovate 3 (2). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=406 (accessed October 13, 2008).



• 21st Century Connections has reconceptualized (in an exciting way!) what the role of the 21st century educator is, namely, a visonary, a leader, an adaptor, a learner, and a risk taker.