Revolution or Evolution? Changing Instructional Practices in the Academy

Hacking the Academy is a project headed up by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.  The idea is to crowdsource an edited volume in a week, which is both innovative and ambitious.  It’s a little unclear how the peer review piece of this will work at this point, but it is clear that there was only a seven-day window for contributions.

I submitted two past blog posts to Hacking the Academy: Clickers, Lecture Capture, and Event Programming (a more conceptual piece) and Backchannel in Education – Nine Uses (a more practical piece).  I wanted to submit something original, as well, so I tried my hand at video production using Jing.  I edited a PowerPoint slide deck I used in a local, face-to-face workshop this spring, then plugged in my USB microphone and recorded a voiceover to go along with the slideshow.

The result is called “Revolution or Evolution? Changing Instructional Practices in the Academy” and you can see it here:

In the video, I compare the “traditional” college lecture format to a vision of the future, one involving all three kinds of backchannel as well as a few Google jockeys.  I argue that helping instructors move from the “traditional” model to this vision of the future will require evolution, not revolution.  One might say, it will require… hacking.

This revolution versus evolution theme is one that I’ll return to this fall at the POD Network conference.  I just found out this week that my proposal for a session on this topic, submitted jointly with Jim Julius of San Diego State University and Dwayne Harapnuik of Abilene Christian University, was approved!  The Hacking the Academy project has started me thinking of ways we can hack this conference session…