The Future of Educational Technology (First Draft)

Now that I’ve processed my experience with the “faculty development question” at yesterday’s meeting of our committee on the Internet and social media, I find myself thinking more about the explicit charge of the committee. How can digital technologies enhance the teaching mission of our university? Here’s a first draft of an answer to that question.

Technology can help our students connect their academic work with the rest of their lives. Margaret Rubega’s use of Twitter in her ornithology class at the University of Connecticut is a simple, but dramatic example of this.
Technology can help our students practice integrative learning, connecting their learning across the courses they take. I gather that this kind of integrative learning takes place at the University of Mary Washington through their blog initiative, UMW Blogs.
Technology can help our students find authentic audiences for their work, increasing their motivation to learn deeply. See my Chronicle essay, “A Social Network Can Be a Learning Network,” for some examples.
Technology can help our students move from consumers of information to producers of knowledge. Check out this course on social and political perspectives on tourism at the University of Lincoln, or this mobile app for collecting examples of graffiti, an app designed and used by students at the University of New Mexico.
Technology can help our students be more engaged and learn more actively in the classroom. I write often about classroom response systems and backchannels, and occasionally about Google jockeys.
Technology can help us make “thin slices” of student learning (to use Randy Bass’ term) more visible, which in turn helps us better understand our students and be more responsive to their learning needs. Clickers work well for this, of course, but check out Mark Sample’s collection of “live tweets” written by his students while watching Blade Runner for some interesting examples of “thin slices.”

What would you add to this list?

Image: “Choices,” me, Flickr (CC)

9 Responses to "The Future of Educational Technology (First Draft)"

Jim says:

February 23, 2012 at 11:03 am

Before extending the list, I’m wondering if there was explicit discussion and agreement among the committee as to just what the “teaching mission” of Vanderbilt is? It seems to me this is the starting point for the discussion. If there’s a mindset that teaching is about excellence in “dissemination of knowledge” (see http://www.vanderbilt.edu/about/mission/), then the ways in which digital tech can enhance that mission are potentially quite different than if the mission is to empower life-long learning, foster critical inquiry, develop reflective and engaged citizens, or other more learning-centered possibilities for a “teaching mission.”

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Derek Bruff says:

February 23, 2012 at 1:11 pm

Great question, Jim. There wasn’t an exploration of what we meant by our “teaching mission,” unfortunately. It seems that one of the things the committee can do is is make recommendations about ways to expand or alter our teaching mission, which is exciting, but without having a conversation about the current mission, that opportunity will be a challenging one.

I think an assumption you’re making in the possible missions you mention is that our focus is on our 13,000 or so students here at Vanderbilt. That’s certainly been the focus of our teaching mission to date, leveraging the fact that most of our students live on or very near campus. But there was a lot of talk yesterday about sharing the knowledge that Vanderbilt faculty and students create outside Vanderbilt. That’s what MIT and Stanford are doing with their open course initiatives, and that kind of thing was certainly in the discussion yesterday.

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Jim says:

February 23, 2012 at 1:32 pm

Interesting … I could see a multi-layered mission, but perhaps the core is (for lack of more academic, precise, and exalted language) that Vanderbilt wants to make the world a better place. That happens through sharing scholarly research and well designed learning materials/experiences/environments. Distinct audiences include research colleagues, Vandy undergrads, Vandy grad students, and the general public (and maybe there are others in the public sphere that Vandy might specifically identify as intended recipients of their influence). At any rate, I think it’s an exciting conversation that you get to be part of, and I think that challenging participants to examine their assumptions about the “teaching mission” could help the work move from evolutionary to something a bit more revolutionary.

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Dan says:

February 23, 2012 at 6:04 pm

Derek,

Did you mean there was *not* a discussion of what is meant by teaching mission, above? I heard discussion of expanding our instruction beyond Vanderbilt’s walls, but didn’t hear much about the richness, critical thinking, life long learning, engaged and active citizens.

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Derek Bruff says:

February 23, 2012 at 6:40 pm

Oops. I left out a “not.” All fixed now.

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Chris Clark says:

February 29, 2012 at 7:00 am

I hope that the future of educational technology is that such a term disappears. I hope we move away from thinking of “technology” as one thing. Let’s become the people who help a faculty member identify an educational need or a problem to be solved and then help identify the tools and strategies to address that concern. We don’t talk about “educational books” specialists or “educational pencils” – why educational technology? I’m not expressing this correctly and I may be arguing myself out of a job, but I think this discussion is important.

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Kieran Mathieson says:

March 5, 2012 at 7:37 am

Help faculty be more effective? Flipped classrooms, for example. Stop lecturing. Spend more time one-on-one with students.

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The Big Picture | TCU eLearning says:

August 20, 2012 at 11:00 am

[…] The Future of Educational Technology – Ideally, in using educational technology, we’re not just helping our students grasp key concepts, but also providing them with authentic, transferable learning experiences and skills, in fitting with the mission of the university and larger beliefs about the role of education in society. If you’re wanting some depth as you think about the larger place of educational technology, this post is a good start. […]

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Timelines, EdTech, and Thin Slices of Student Learning says:

February 10, 2016 at 10:46 am

[…] brings me to a post I wrote back in 2012, while serving on a committee at Vanderbilt tasked with setting an ambitious agenda for the […]

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