Editor's Note
"Tomorrow is Already Here." It's a Stereolab song, that, on one level, is about the inverted relationship between institutions and society. Who serves whom? Meditate on that thought for too long and everything feels trite and futile. It's the anxiety of any futurist with a heart. (But if you're a Stereolab fan, it's "bob up and down tastic!")
In a very real way, tomorrow is always already here. In the realm of emerging learning technologies, we're constantly searching for the most telling signals of how the teaching landscape is morphing, knowing that we're already in the midst of that change. For the past six years, the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) have published a forward-looking research paper that tries to take snapshots of the future. The Horizon Report tries to bundle its vision into one-, three-, and five-years-to-adoption scenarios. One of the current significant trends they identified was "access to - and portability of - content [that] is increasing as smaller, more powerful devices are introduced." We refer to these collectively as mobile learning technologies.
In his review article, D. Christopher Brooks begins to look not only at the state of mobile technologies on the University of Minnesota campus, but also at the research questions this new emphasis will bring to the fore. If we can see that tools like podcasts, vodcasts, iTunes U, smartphones, laptops, and other personal portable devices are going to change the learning environment, we can begin to plan how we might study their impact.
J.D. Walker and Aimee Whiteside continue this exploration as they begin to research new classroom spaces designed for greater collaboration and team-based learning. These so called active learning classrooms - implemented by Steve Fitzgerald and the Office of Classroom Management - have small circular tables around which students can gather in groups, work on computers, and then transmit their results to overhead LCDs. The rooms are enveloped in large glass writing boards on which to brainstorm and report group findings. These highly designed spaces seem almost the flipside of those created by most mobile technologies, which have the capacity to be disruptive. When we begin to juxtapose these learning conditions, we begin to see the kinds of new tensions that are emerging as we adopt an increasingly diverse set of learning technologies.
"What do we want our students to learn?" That was the question with which Arlene Carney, vice provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs, began the first issue of Transform. Since we ran that article in 2006, the Faculty Senate on the Twin Cities campus officially adopted the undergraduate student learning outcomes. Today we revisit that complex effort in a conversation with Cynthia Murdoch, the coordinator for Student Learning Assessment. We're at a midpoint in that initiative where many colleges have made quite a lot of progress, but there is still much work to accomplish before the University's next accreditation self-study begins in 2013.
In his memoir, Professor Mike White describes his passion for Italian food, culture, and the connections among family, pasta, Venice, and teaching. Mike's autobiography was written as part of the Center for Teaching and Learning's "Making Meaning of a Life in Teaching" program. Currently, a cohort of faculty writers are investing themselves in a new memoir program called "This I Have Learned." Look for excerpts from that program in future issues of Transform and please consider joining that writing group.
In addition to our calendar and the usual review of upcoming conferences, we are once again showcasing a pair of article reviews. Paul Ching examines the evidence of two new studies. One experiment examines the surprising importance of seat location in lecture courses. A second project looks at the common practice of instructor-sanctioned "cheat sheets."
You'll note several authors in this issue are from the Office of Information Technology's (OIT) Digital Media Center (DMC). We want to thank OIT and the DMC for co-sponsoring this issue of Transform. When we seek to view the horizon of SoTL, it would be difficult to imagine it without the research agendas that emerging technologies and new learning environments present.
Paul Baepler
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