Professional Development

I was very fortunate to spend Friday at the Duke CIT Showcase. I attended a bunch of interesting sessions on the Duke Digital Initiatives, video feedback on assignments, alumni readers/critiques, a student’s perspectives of blogs in the classroom, iTunes University, and the physical arrangement of classroom space. James Groom, of the EduPunk movement gave the keynote.

I am constantly impressed with Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology. I’ve been paying attention to them for a few years, but really became a fan after attending last year’s showcase. The showcase is really for the Duke community, though they’re kind enough to invite those of us who do this type of work, too. The presentations are all by Duke faculty for Duke faculty, focusing on really cutting edge or interesting ways of incorporating new technologies into the classroom. I normally feel really up on this type of thing, but both times I’ve come away with new ideas. The keynote is normally (at least based on the past two) a nationally known innovator in educational technology.

From the sessions I attended there were two main themes of the day:

1. There is a benefit to having the “real world” view student work.
2. Providing audio feedback allows you to give students more feedback.

I am totally down with theme number one. This is why I try to put so much of the courses I work with online in public places. This is one of the reasons I avoid traditional learning management systems (like Blackboard). Point two is new to me. Though I love multimedia, and think of it a lot for student assignments, I hadn’t thought about all that it could provide by incorporating it into my grading. I have a few FERPA related things I want to work through (for example, I would assume spoken comments are FERPA encumbered, so do we have to keep those off the network?) but I definitely want to find ways to incorporate this. It actually reminds me a bit of the old-school tutor model, where you could have conversations with students (or, at least, more conversational feedback).

Out of the showcase came a few things I want to try:

• A syndication plugin for a blog, rather than using FriendFeed, for my next class
• Voice comments in lieu of written comments

Another theme for me, though not a major theme of the showcase, was that information management issues are increasingly intertwined with educational technology issues. Again, this is one of the reasons why I tend to think that librarians are in an excellent place to lead here. As faculty start having questions about archiving, indexing, and preserving the scholarly material created by a class, librarians are in an excellent place to be able to answer them.

Great stuff, and certainly worth the drive! I’m looking forward to seeing what they’re up to next year.

Last week I attended TRI-IT, representing the library. Tri-IT is an informal group of people who work with instructional technology in Triangle and Triad universities. It’s a mix of people, from IS departments, from teaching and learning centers, and from libraries. Several of the Wake Forest University ITGs attended as well.

Blogs, wikis, and podcasting are still hot topics, as most of the sessions I attended focused on these tools. I participated in a panel discussing how different departments in different institutions address educational technologies, so I spoke on our support of our blogs, wikis, and podcasts, and talked about the cycle of experimentation, piloting, supporting, and hosting that we’ve developed for instructional technology.

The highlight of these meetings, for me, is the round-robin report, where each institution talks about what they’re working on. Most everyone talked about the economy and its impact on their work. Some are restructuring how they approach their work to streamline their services. Most are working with Blackboard 8 as well as piloting open source course management systems like Sakai and Moodle.

It was a good day, and I was glad to hear what everyone was up to. It was also nice to connect with some of the UNCG library folks in attendance and see other familiar faces. Duke said they’d host next time, so look for another report in the fall!