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Last week, I made a big decision: I accepted a job within academia, but outside the undergraduate classroom. I've always seen myself as a teacher first and foremost, but recently my adjunct faculty position, and its ridiculously low pay--when you figure in benefits, I'm making less than I was as teaching assistant, and teaching twice as many classes--began to wear on me. Accordingly, I've accepted a job teaching faculty how to use and think about instructional technologies. I start part-time in December and, as I complete the remaining portions of my teaching contract, will gradually move to full-time ed tech consulting by the beginning of spring.
For me, it's a perfect job and a potentially awkward one.
It's perfect because if there's one thing I do a lot of, it's think about how to connect in meaningful ways with my students. My experience has been that technology can be a help or a hindrance, depending on how it's implemented. Over the past year, some of my students have been nervous about blogging, for example, but this term's students are diving gleefully into developing wiki-based essays that feature streaming video.
It's also perfect because I love playing with Web 2.0 technology and trying to figure out how best to implement it in the classroom. For example, as part of a project on cultural and physical landscapes, I asked my students last summer to annotate a map on CommunityWalk of a street that runs all the way through town.
It's a potentially awkward position for me because there's the danger that I'll simply become a technology evangelist, trying to find a technological fix for problems to which there may be a simpler, and better, solution.
It's also awkward because the position calls upon me to introduce the faculty to our campus's new learning-management system, a Sakai-based collection of various modules such as discussion forums, wikis, virtual office hours, online quizzes, and more. But in my initial exploration of this system, I'm finding parts of it more difficult to navigate than other free resources. For example, the wiki on the campus system requires users to know wiki code, but the free accounts at Wikispaces don't. Which system should I recommend? The "official" one I'm employed to teach, or the more user-friendly Wikispaces? I have the same question about discussion forums.
Fortunately, it sounds as if the faculty and I will be able to suggest modifications to the open-source system, but I'm not sure how many or what the timetable will be on any upgrades. I do sense that my ideas will have the support of my new boss. Yay for people who appreciate innovation.
I'm lucky, too, that so many educational technologists blog and are generous with their knowledge and ideas. At the 2006 BlogHer conference, for example, Barbara Ganley of Middlebury College, Barbara Sawhill of Oberlin, and Laura Blankenship of Bryn Mawr College led a lively discussion on edublogging, and they sustain similar conversations on their blogs. EdTechTalk also serves as a resource on educational technology. Others who write about technology issues relevant to education--and this is by no means an exhaustive list--include Anne Davis of EduBlog Insights and George State University, Jenny Levine of The Shifted Librarian, Innovate - a journal of online education, Sarah Lohnes of A Day in the Life, and the bloggers of Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning.
To which blogs and journals do you turn for the latest news on educational technology? And if you're an educational technologist, what do you see as the big issues in the field today? Please help out this newbie.
Leslie Madsen-Brooks is an academic and freelance writer who blogs at The Clutter Museum and Museum Blogging.
