The Bottom Line - The Educational Experience
As CIOs we are first and foremost administrators, and most of our time is spent planning, coordinating, negotiating, budgeting, etc. Sometimes we are so focused on solving problems and putting out fires that we lose sight of the core of what we’re all about: enriching the education experience. I was able to reaffirm that purpose earlier this week.
I was invited to attend the last class of the semester where students (Adolescence Education majors) in an English Language Arts Class presented their final projects. The instructor had participated in our Institute on Teaching Strategies last summer, and redesigned her class to be truly collaborative using Web 2.0 technologies.
The class developed a wiki and blog, and their final assignment was designed for students to research a contemporary societal issue and communicate through the electronic media and social networking applications. The instructor, who herself was just learning about new media and their applications in education, took a risk. The success of her class would partially depend on robust and reliable systems and strong technical support. The class required collaboration of many kinds: among students, between faculty and students, and also among the class (both instructor and students), librarians, and technologists.
For me, that is where the proverbial rubber hit the road, and where the distinctions between information itself and technology were forever blurred. Research, writing, and technology skills became parts of a greater whole. The advantages of our blended library/IT organization were never so apparent: the librarians and the technology trainer worked together and they engaged the support of our distributed computing and enterprise technologists, who made systems work and provided centralized storage for the data-intensive final projects.
The instructor will be giving a presentation about her experience in developing and teaching this class at the upcoming SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies (CIT). You can check out the student projects at the following links: