Summer is winding down and school is approaching. Being the person that I am, I spent a fair amount of my summer within arm's reach of my HP laptop. While at my apartment in San Luis Obispo I had readily available wireless access to keep up on work with MITE, stay in touch with my family via email and talk to college friends with Facebook. When I was able to go home and it was too hot for frisbee we'd play games and get on YouTube with the Wii. On vacation I had my laptop and my acoustic guitar and spent nights tracking my summer writing.
With school less than 2 weeks away, however, it's almost time to say good bye to most of these habits. I won't be home nearly as often and with spotty wireless coverage anywhere but the library my email will sit unread until late each evening. With studying, reading assignments and homework the Wii will sit idle and my guitar won't be recorded again until winter break hits in December.
It seems a little odd to me, especially as a student at a Polytechnic school, that my 'many technologies' will go nearly unused during the school year. I am in a fairly computer-based major so I will have occasional assignments that require me to use Creative Suite and upload files to Blackboard, but note the word 'occasional'. In most cases that really means 'if you don't finish in class'.
This leads me to a question suggested to me by Ruth, do faculty want us or support us in using the technology we know so well? You would be hard pressed to find a college student that doesn't know how to shoot or do simple editing on digital photos, to organize a music library containing thousands of songs, to check email from a cell phone...we use technology nearly constantly. Socially and in terms of entertainment we're more productive and efficient than ever before, we can carry every song we've ever heard, make phone calls and surf the internet from our pocket.
With the first generation of true technology natives coming into place, do administrators and faculty understand what we're capable of'? I would love to hear from faculty, teachers, educators or anyone involved in learning, would you want to implement these technologies into learning?
9/6/07
National Conference Season
The MITE Team is on the road, traveling the country to participate in a growing number of conferences about education, technology and online learning. National conferences tend to bunch up in the fall, but we also present, conduct workshops and organize round tables throughout the year at smaller, focused, regional conferences. We especially enjoy hooking up with NROC members to share tales and ideas.
Each year there are a few consistently popular topics that pop up across most, if not all, of the conferences. As one would expect, these themes show up when they are somewhere between the second stage of innovation and becoming mainstream. Conferences are one of best venues for spreading innovation beyond pioneers. When a conference room is packed with faculty and staff learning about educational applications of games, virtual reality environments, podcasts and web. 2.0 tools, you can expect to see the tools turning up in classrooms and online programs in non-tech subjects at a campus near you.
This year we continue to see standing-room-only sessions around tools that allow instructors and students to co-create immersive and interactive learning. Techie-pioneers were presenting earlier versions of such tools in previous years; now practitioner-pioneers share their reflections on the realities of using the tools to teach. Educators who advocate for more constructivist learning methods should be delighted at the abundance of these types of tools coming into mainstream use.
It's very encouraging to see an increase in sessions on two important non-tech subjects, which we at MITE have been pushing for a few years: sustainable models for open education resource (OER) projects, and inter-institutional collaboratives for developing and sharing digital content. We'll share some new ideas and highlights as we hear them out there.
What other topics are hot this year? We'll report back from the conference circuit, and welcome your comments.
Each year there are a few consistently popular topics that pop up across most, if not all, of the conferences. As one would expect, these themes show up when they are somewhere between the second stage of innovation and becoming mainstream. Conferences are one of best venues for spreading innovation beyond pioneers. When a conference room is packed with faculty and staff learning about educational applications of games, virtual reality environments, podcasts and web. 2.0 tools, you can expect to see the tools turning up in classrooms and online programs in non-tech subjects at a campus near you.
This year we continue to see standing-room-only sessions around tools that allow instructors and students to co-create immersive and interactive learning. Techie-pioneers were presenting earlier versions of such tools in previous years; now practitioner-pioneers share their reflections on the realities of using the tools to teach. Educators who advocate for more constructivist learning methods should be delighted at the abundance of these types of tools coming into mainstream use.
It's very encouraging to see an increase in sessions on two important non-tech subjects, which we at MITE have been pushing for a few years: sustainable models for open education resource (OER) projects, and inter-institutional collaboratives for developing and sharing digital content. We'll share some new ideas and highlights as we hear them out there.
What other topics are hot this year? We'll report back from the conference circuit, and welcome your comments.
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