Faculty Explore Emerging
Learning Environments
by Lauren Marsh and Kimerly Wilcox
What does a university need to do in order to become a leader in designing, utilizing, and evaluating emerging learning environments? The Office of Information Technology's Digital Media Center (DMC) 2008-09 Faculty Fellows are engaging this question in the context of a program that encourages interdisciplinary dialogue and partnerships with campus leaders across the University of Minnesota. Our partners are helping to frame the institutional questions that need to be addressed if the University is to become a twenty-first century leader in emerging learning environments.
The group records their reflections about the surprises and struggles they face as they learn to design and evaluate emerging learning environments. As faculty exploring educational technologies and administrators working to support faculty, you are invited to participate in the discussion. Visit the blog: read the posts, share your insights, or ask a question.
Below is an excerpt from the Faculty Fellowship blog on "emerging learning environments" between Amy Garrett Dikkers and Brad Cohen.
Amy
The more time I spend thinking about my own faculty fellowship project (redesigning curriculum for a new learning space, specifically the active learning classroom) and attend Faculty Fellowship Program meetings, the more I think what we are really doing is delving into a new version of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
For example, I was first tech-driven in my redesign for my fellowship: "How can I use the affordances of the active learning classroom to enhance School and Society, an educational foundations course for initial teaching licensure students?" Now, as I am thinking about team-based learning, designing cooperative learning groups in 3s and 9s (easily afforded by the space), revamping projects to take advantage of Web 2.0 tools like wikis, blogs, and social networking sites, I realize that I am re-visioning my teaching and my students' learning.
Perhaps taking the focus from technology-enhanced learning to "The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Goes Digital" is the way to go? What do you think?
Brad
Interesting ideas! If there is anything distinctive about SOTETL [a new coinage - the scholarship of technology-enhanced teaching and learning!], I suspect it is in the doing of it and the multiple perspectives, disciplines and organizationally-unique collaboration that marks the best of it. SoTL can be all of these, but SOTETL may "require" it. When technology is in the mix, good scholarship draws on research in educational technology, in teaching and learning, and in the discipline of focus in the course. And, often, the development of the environment and its scholarly investigation are marked by collaboration between experts in these domains.
That your experience is marked by a widening reconsideration of the very foundations of your course strikes me as a particularly vivid instance of the often-cited observation that technology is a change agent. It's less often noted that for it to really be a change agent, agents have to be open to making change!
You can visit and contribute to the blog by going to http://blog.lib.umn. edu/dmc/dmcoitfacultyfellows0809. If you are actively involved in leading institutional conversations about emerging learning environments and would like to join as a partner, please contact Kimerly Wilcox (wilco001@umn.edu) or Lauren Marsh (lauren@umn.edu).
Lauren Marsh and Kimerly Wilcox are senior educational technology consultants at the Office of Information Technology's Digital Media Center.
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