OMDE 603: Learning Technology Units and Faculty Training

Note: This post is an extra one. Stay tuned for my post on Moore's and Kearsley's Chapter 5!

Chapter 5 of Bates and Sangra (2011), "Organizational Structures and Initiatives" addresses the challenges that universities face in managing Technology* writ large. It's a daunting task, to say the least; after reading this, I am far more sympathetic to the tasks that my large research institution faces with regards to IT organization, maintenance, and planning.

*The capital T I'm using for Technology is intentional: it's meant as a reminder that this is a ginormous topic, one that is overwhelming for me to imagine at a systems, or university-wide level.

First, there are (at least) two main branches of Technology to contend with: administrative and teaching and learning. Technology initiatives for administrative purposes came first; teaching and learning have haphazardly followed suit (Bates & Sangra, 2011, pp. 27-30). What this has led to in many institutions is an amorphous central IT division that is "responsible for telecommunications and campus network infrastrtucture and services...administrative software systems support, IT support, network access, and software maintenance of the institutional LMS" (Bates & Sangra, 2011, p. 115). This is fine. This makes sense. This alone is a hefty task, one that requires a healthy, well-funded staff with a "line of governance" that goes straight up to the Provost's office. I know this is the case at my institution; we have a CIO (a new one in the wake of the huge security breach last semester) and I'm sure if I went to our website I'd find the whole organizational structure for IT management.

I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to write what I know based on my five years teaching here as a technology-heavy faculty member. I regularly take workshops facilitated by the Learning Technologies Institute, a wing of the DIT. I know two of the instructional technologists very well. I think there are more. We created our own Office of Instructional Technology in our department a year ago; it's an office of two people: the full-time assistant director, with whom I work closely, and the Director who is also the overall Ops Director in the department. We also have our full-time tech god, who is in charge of the support services described in the quoted material in the above paragraph for our department.

I work for a huge R1 university. We need a lot of tech support. Like, a LOT. And not just support, but long-term planning. Innovation. Maintenance. Training. This requires being able to see into a crystal ball to know what kinds of technologies to pursue and which trends are unsustainable fads.

I'm sure we spend a zillion dollars a year on tech services and support. Here's the thing: If we have security breaches wherein the personal data, including home addresses and SSNs of faculty, students, and staff all the way back to the late 90s were compromised, how can we justifiably move some of the funding for basic security to faculty training and support?

This is making my head spin. It's also making me look at our new Teaching and Learning Technology Center (TLTC. I think that's the acronym.) in a different light. I've been cautiously optimistic about this center since I first heard about it last fall. Cautious, because my work over the last three years is largely the result of a new initiative (blended learning), the enthusiasm for which died sharply after just one year. I'm still around, but the excitement for BL was promptly replaced by the excitement for MOOCs, which are of course much sexier and have mega publicity benefits. BL is local. MOOCs are global.

The TLTC is subsuming the LTI and CTE, the Center for Teaching Excellence. In this way, it's taking the two bodies devoted to teaching and learning and bringing them under one roof, which I heartily support even more so after reading this chapter. Having two centers--one for "teaching excellence" and one for "learning technologies" is archaic and wasteful. They need to be in the same place. Learning technologies should not be seen as separate from teaching excellence--they should be part of it (because they are). At issue, of course, is a small thing called faculty buy-in. According to Bates and Sangra (2011), Virginia Tech and UCT have mandatory (?) faculty training, or "systematic policies and strategies to ensure that all faculty and instructors using technology had training in the use of technology for teaching" (p. 119). Well, that would be everybody, wouldn't it? Yet I can't imagine being the poor soul to announce to the university that all faculty have to do anything. Faculty autonomy is the last thing that we have.

This is running long; in my next post I want to look at faculty autonomy more closely--the phenomenon that students often have to deal with several LMSs or course websites in any given semester, based on faculty preference; the refusal of some faculty to learn how to use simple tools that will make their and their students' lives infinitely easier; the persistent fear that technology somehow threatens the human element of teaching or even that technology will replace teachers, etc. I also want to look at the overall budget of my institution. I know faculty are expensive, but I also know that the number one reason that tuition costs have skyrocketed over the past thirty years is administrative bloat. Yet looking at technology needs alone forces me to realize that the pejorative "administrative bloat" must of course include technology services and support. These jobs are vital. They are hopelessly complex: one tiny, yet critical example of this is that no university can attract students if their wireless access is even remotely problematic, something that is harder and harder to ensure when every person on campus is carrying at least two mobile devices at any given time. These jobs require significant expertise.

Expertise is expensive. Our president is telling universities that we must keep tuition down. Meanwhile, adjuncts like myself make half of what public school teachers make. This whole enterprise is fracked up. Like completely.

Blended and Digital Innovations in the Academic Writing Program

Yesterday, I met with a few of my fellow blended instructors to see what everyone's been up to this semester, report on the OWI Committee and other highlights from the 4Cs, and look forward to the upcoming academic year. Even with just four of us, our discussion was so lively that we didn't get to the last item at all. Here are some highlights:

New this Semester:

DB started us off by explaining how he's incorporated the digital project into the syllabus. He's having his students create websites on Weebly and "got their feet wet" with the Rhetorical Analysis. This is a good move: his students have at least two months to play with their websites instead of having to build them in just a few weeks, as mine will this semester. DB is using the digital project as the Revision assignment; students will revise their EoE and Position Paper and add them to their websites. His students will also add their annotated bibliographies and have a separate section for "other voices." His students have responded enthusiastically to this addition, which gives me confidence about introducing this in a couple of weeks.

JE was impressed but wondered if building websites was a little advanced for English 101. DB replied that it was easy for students--they know how to do this. Even if they hadn't built a website before, they know what one looks like and what makes a good one. He's going to collaborate with his students on how these should be assessed, which is a recommended strategy that many have written about, including our new hire, Chanon Adsanatham. A link to his 2012 Computers and Composition article, “Integrating Assessment and Instruction: Using Student-Generated Grading Criteria to Evaluate Multimodal Digital Projects,” is on his website.

On this note, I offered that students possess an internal grammar for visual rhetoric. They may not have the terminology, but they have the grammar, a point that DK picked up on. He's been doing a lot of work recently on students' right to their own language and opened this semester with Vershawn A. Young's 2010 Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies article, "Should Writers Use They Own English," which immediately gets students talking about writing from Day One. I think DK needs to give a workshop or a presentation on this for the AWP, as I don't think that this principle, as old as it is (1974), is familiar to most people in the program. Here's a link to the CCCC Position on Students' Right to Their Own Language, with a link to an annotated bibliography.

JE talked about her experience working with a TA this semester and couldn't be happier! Her TA is phenomenal, and her only regret is that she only has a TA for one of her sections instead of two. DK and I were both thrilled, of course, and we all looked at DB: when is he going to start working with TAs? DB replied that he already had one in mind, and we pointed him to the application for 388V on the AWP website: 388V Internship Application

I then talked about how I've redesigned my course to focus on students' digital literacy, much of which can be found elsewhere on this blog. The two texts I highly recommend are the ones I discussed at length with several people I met at the 4Cs: Eli Pariser's 2011 Ted Talk on Internet Filter Bubbles and Fogleman, Niedbala, and Bedell's 2013 Behavioral and Social Sciences Librarian article, "Writing and Publishing in a Blended Learning Environment to Develop Students' Scholarly Digital Ethos." That link is to ERIC, which can be accessed for free through our library.

I also touched briefly on my class Twitter @LyraBL101 and how my students are using Twitter to enter the "public" conversation. My students have made a new Twitter for class (some of them have kept their own, which is fine), tweeted their research question with #Lyra101, and followed at least ten people or organizations who are tweeting about their topic. I emphasized that they need to be following at least three people who they disagree with, which I hope will help at least a few of them with the upcoming Rogerian Letter. I held conferences this week, and several students mentioned that they had found useful articles and links for their projects on Twitter, which is exactly what I'd been hoping for.

Neither JE, DK, or DB are on Twitter, so it was a little hard to explain all of this in the short amount of time that we had. I showed them my hootsuite and my TweetDeck to show them all of the conversations I follow: #fycchat, #4C14, #ncte, #engchat, #digcit, #digped, #blendchat, #blendedlearning, #highered, etc. Many key people and organizations can be found through our BL Twitter account, @BLWritingUMD, currently being managed by the impeccable @Courtney_Guth.

Sharing our Work

With only ten minutes left in our meeting, I quickly showed everyone the CCCC page for the Committee on Effective Practices for OWI and explained the new Open Resource (OR) site that the Committee has just launched. I want all of us to contribute our work--the BL and OWI community will benefit from a robust set of resources to draw from. This works both ways: these will be peer-reviewed publications, which will help individuals. On a broader note, I'd like to see a strong UMD presence on this site, which will help all of us here. So please, submit your work! The Call for Submissions can be found on this page.

I also mentioned that I'll be presenting on Voicethread at the ITL Conference at the end of April. This is a great, one-day conference; some of my recent work has come directly from presentations at this conference. Registration is quick and free: Innovations in Teaching and Learning 2014

As always, I'm inspired by everyone's work in and out of the classroom, and look forward to catching up again towards the end of the semester!

Thanks for reading, everyone!