POD Network Conference 2010 – Revolution or Evolution?

I’ll be writing more about the session at the POD Network Conference in St. Louis I facilitated last week with Dwayne Harapnuik (Abilene Christian University) and Jim Julius (San Diego State University), but I wanted to share a few observations while everything is still fresh in my mind. The session was titled “Revolution or Evolution? Social Technologies and Pedagogical Change,” and it focused on a couple of trends (ubiquitous access to information via laptops and smart phones, social technologies that allow new and more inclusive forms of collaboration) that have the potential to radically change the higher ed landscape.  I’ve embedded our Prezi below, and you can find a few more resources on the WikiPODia page for our session.

Now, a few thoughts on the session…

I do what I can to be well-read, and I think that paid off in the session. I don’t read as many books as I would like, but the books I read (like Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus, about which I’ve blogged here) tend to be ones from outside the usual higher education literature. I do, however, read a lot of blogs and follow many interesting people on Twitter. Doing so gives me access to a wide variety of ideas, examples, and resources that I try to leverage in my presentations. Bringing ideas from outside of the faculty developer community to my colleagues in POD meant that I had ideas to share that were new to our audience. I imagine that Jim and Dwayne had a similar experience along these lines.

Recently, when I have used Prezi with audiences of faculty members, I’ve received many questions about the presentation tool after my talks. I didn’t receive many questions about Prezi after the talk at POD, which I take to be a sign that the tool is more widely known among faculty developers than it is among faculty. It’s also possible that my POD colleagues didn’t realize I was using something other than PowerPoint. I’d prefer to think that they’re a little more savvy than that, however, so I’ll take their lack of questions as a good sign.

Also, this was the first session I’ve led in which the Twitter backchannel was not only robust but necessary for me as a facilitator. When we turned the participants loose to work in small groups identifying challenges to change in higher education, the 80-or-so people in the room made so much (productive) noise that it was almost impossible to circulate among them and eavesdrop, as I usually do during small group work. Fortunately, there were a number of Twitter users present who were able to give me a sense of the table conversations through their tweets.

Dwayne and Jim and I are planning to write more about the session in an upcoming ProfHacker guest post, so stay tuned!