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Common Culture Created/supported/enhanced By The Academic Library On Campus
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Teaching
with Technology Fairs. Five or six faculty members who are successfully
using technology are asked to present at each fair. The goal is to have
presenters from various disciplines, a wide range of educational uses,
and projects representing various levels of sophistication. The format
is similar to a poster session, with each presenter at a workstation
demonstrating his or her work. Faculty who attend are free to converse
with each presenter as long as they wish. Questions are often raised
about the length of time needed to develop an application, the effect on
student learning and motivation, and the amount of skill required.
Lunch
Bytes. These brown bag lunch sessions often feature individual faculty
who have used technology in effective ways, ranging from visualization
of earthquakes in geology to student projects requiring use of
import/export rate databases in global economics to virtual cooperative
learning groups and electronic portfolios in occupational therapy. Each
of these sessions attracts a diverse group of faculty who are often able
to see how the ideas presented might apply in their own discipline.
Live
Teleconferences. These satellite downlink programs, obtained from
vendors enable Duquesne faculty to be aware of cutting-edge uses of
educational technology. Immediately following such a downlink,
participants discuss possible application of ideas presented during the
program within the Duquesne University environment. Computing center and
faculty development center staff serve as resources for this
discussion.
Teaching Workshops. The faculty development center
regularly offers workshops on a wide range of topics such as critical
thinking, cooperative learning, and problem-based learning. Whenever
appropriate, the content of these workshops includes ways in which
technology might be used to reach the desired instructional goal. For
example, structured, threaded discussion can stimulate critical
thinking; cooperative learning groups meeting via computer conferencing
can transcend the bounds of time and space imposed by the traditional
face-to-face classroom; and information garnered from online resources
and dialogue among class members may facilitate problem solving. In
addition to these workshops on general pedagogical topics that include
ideas for using technology, occasional workshops explicitly focus on
technology-enhanced pedagogy. An example of this was the workshop,
“Teaching Online Using Computer Conferencing Software,†offered in the
fall of 1996 by the first faculty member at Duquesne to teach a totally
online course. In this workshop, she described her use of discussion,
case studies, and small group work and showed evidence indicating that
students had attained the goals of the course.
Stimulate individual
faculty and departments to think about their learning goals for students
and how technology might be used to help students attain these goals.
As
noted earlier, the most common uses of technology such as e-mail and
presentation software tend to be “add-ons†to current pedagogy and do
not capitalize on the real power of technology to revolutionize the
teaching/learning process. Encouraging faculty to identify their basic
goals for a course, on the other hand, frees them to think more
creatively. What do they wish students to be able to do at the end of
the course? What are the “bottlenecks†(critical concepts that many
students fail to master) in a particular course? What kind of
experiences and assignments will help students to master course goals?
These kinds of questions provide the basis for considering alternative,
technology-based approaches to facilitating student attainment of course
goals–perhaps drill-and-practice tutorials for basic skills, computer
conferencing to develop critical thinking, or multimedia to enhance
visualization of important concepts. Likewise, an academic department
might consider its overall goals for graduates of its programs and how
technology could be integrated into courses to ensure that students do,
in fact, reach those goals. For example, students in journalism might
need to develop skills in carrying out online research, evaluating
credibility of sources, and creating Web pages. In what courses will
these skills be developed and how will these competencies be verified?
Duquesne
University encourages this “ground up†rethinking of courses and
possible uses of technology on the part of individual faculty as well as
by schools and departments. When schools and departments pursue such
thinking, there is the potential for significant curricular reform. What
follows are a few ways that Duquesne has fostered rethinking of
pedagogy.
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