Presented at EDUCAUSE Annual Conferences, Instructional Technologies, and Teaching and Learning

Second Life is a user-created virtual world simultaneously played by thousands of people around the world. In this session, we’ll share our experiences of teaching in Second Life. Using the interaction combinations integration model we developed as a framework, we will describe our projects, outcomes, and recommendations.

HumaniTech links humanities and technology by combining the perspectives and skills of faculty and staff from both humanities and campus-wide resources to work across disciplines and lines that often divide the research university: research/teaching, central/local control, faculty/staff, traditionalists/innovators. HumaniTech focuses on collaboration where IT is essential to these bridge-building efforts rather than a goal in itself.

Many of the motivations for podcasting a class take on a different light when dealing with a freshman course at 8:00 a.m. The presentation will highlight a portable and easy-to-use podcasting implementation and address some of the unique challenges of using podcasting for a freshman class.

This presentation will demonstrate discipline-specific case studies to enhance faculty development in universal design for learning. We will highlight California State University's EnACT project, which supports learning for 10,000 CSU students with disabilities, and MERLOT ELIXR, a faculty development collaboration across state systems and campuses for developing cases and shared teaching resources.

This session will report on the Digital Enhanced Learning Initiative (DELI), which explores how student-centered technologies can enhance students' academic experiences. Students in five freshman seminars received an iPod or a digital camera to complete course work. Students keep the technology in exchange for sharing information on their use during their remaining four years at the college.

The University of Nebraska at Omaha is engaged in shifting campus culture from teaching to learning through the adoption of myMAPP-mapping academic performance through e-portfolios-an innovative e-portfolio system that addresses how all parts of an institution contribute to the continuous improvement of learning.

Which traditional practices should we forsake, and which ones should we cherish? Coming to an understanding of our own goals is critical because we must identify the problems before finding the solutions. By drawing on experience in the classroom and administration, it's possible to find strategies that work. Some of these are surprising; others necessitate a fundamental shift in the culturalassumptions found in higher education. If we want to live bravely in this new world, we must ask the questions which may not give us the "right" answers; we must be brave enough to make distinctions between real innovation and cosmetic change.

Professor Lucinda Roy is Alumni Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech. She served as Associate Dean for Curriculum, Outreach and Diversity for the College of Arts and Sciences from 1993-1996. During Spring, 1992, she was the visiting Margaret Bundy Scott Professor of English at Williams College in Massachusetts.