What I do.

[laurion]

I often get questions from people wondering why it is I'm paid to sit in front of a computer and play around on the web much of the day, why I make a point of joining facebook, myspace, twitter, livejournal, etc, why I've installed and tried dozens of wiki engines, blog engines, rss agregators, audio, video, and other content creation software. I often sum up my job as straddling the divide between teaching and technology, that my job is to support faculty in bringing technology into the curriculum. But along the lines of show, not tell, I present to you the reader, a set of links to important and relevent works that sum things up nicely.

First, a YouTube video on the life of the current student. Technology is such a big part of their lives, it has to become part of their educational infrastructure as well.

Next, an article on the challenges of integrating technology into pedagogy (the art of teaching). This is an excellent article that sums up a lot of my daily frustrations, hurdles, and goals.

Educause Review Article (Educause is a great resource)

Lastly, another YouTube video, from the same group at KSU, about some of the results of technological integration.

View this post on my blog

Comments

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

You are made of awesome and win.

Sometime when you're not planning a wedding, I would love to talk to you for hours about this stuff.

[laurion]

Happy to. Even if you want to talk for some length of time less than hours, I'm almost always on IM (pick your IM network...) at work, and e-mail gets a fast turnaround too. Heck, I can even be talked into lunchtime meetings, especially when the weather is nice.

[koboldninja-5.livejournal.com]

I agree with these 100% and have to say that both youtube clips were informative, interesting and well put together. I have gotten the same query from a couple of people, even just about my work-study job.

Personally I learn better in person and would rather have a discussion than either an online course or a lecture, but I know others who do it differently. I have actually given some thought into how to get students to come to classes since I have noticed trends that involve people missing more and more classes because the lectures are useless or are posted online, but as of yet I haven't come up with anything innovative or promising.

[laurion]

The answer is that class time has to be about something other than feeding the sacred knowledge from instructor to student. Especially in the humanities though, this can be a difficult model to get past. Ideally though, you'd want to do what certain Ancient Greek teachers did, which was to have the students study a topic on their own, then come to the instructor and have a dialog where they progressed past simple knowledge and into understanding. Literature classes do this fairly well; you are expected to do the reading outside of class, and then have fruitful discussion about it in class, to build insight and interpretation.

[koboldninja-5.livejournal.com]

This is why I really like Walker's class style--you read and you discuss. Personally this is how I learn best, so long as students are still able to ask about certain "facts" (i.e. the historical narrative), so that the class is still on the same page about what happened. Interpretation can happen from there.

[lordameth.livejournal.com]

The irony is not lost on me that I am reading this on LJ, tapping out a quick response, and moving on to check my Facebook, mixi, Gmail, Hotmail, WordPress, and 5 webcomics, since I have little time before I need to get my day started "for real"...

Very interesting stuff - just the tip of the iceberg of a very deep and broadly relevant/important topic. I shall come back to watch the second video later...

[doxasticpirate.livejournal.com]

Definitely interesting stuff -- I'll have to talk to you about this a bunch more sometime soon...