Instructional Technologies

The phone rings. The caller begins with the familiar, “I’ve been thinking...” and the rest of the conversation centers on how to pilot an emerging instructional technology. Faculty who are early adopters of technology are experimenters and risk-takers; they broaden the landscape of effective teaching and learning with technology. Yes, they push the envelope, but they also offer partnership for identifying what’s scalable and sustainable for broader use. Our panelists will share their campus perspectives on adopting emerging technologies from Web 2.0 to virtual worlds, their successes and challenges, and the partnerships they’ve formed.

Do you have a program or class at your institution that needs to be refreshed and revitalized? Could you sharpen your students' critical thinking skills by incorporating active learning techniques, information literacy competencies, and fresh, new technologies? If you can answer "yes" to either of these questions, then our program can help both you and your colleagues. Come learn how we breathed new life into our old standard of instruction by collaborating through three distinctively different groups: First Year Programs, the academic library, and teaching faculty. The result was a more contemporary yet engaging learning experience for all involved.

This session will describe lessons learned from the perspective of a public institution's creation of a "new" academic technologist role. The process included the willingness of IT leadership to innovate to improve teaching and learning, paying attention to best practices, promoting assessment to inform decision making, and nourishing a collaborative culture in support of faculty development. We will share our early experiences with defining and implementing the directorship.

Many college students today are comfortable communicating through digital media. Simultaneously, faculty members are increasingly cognizant of the pedagogical benefits of digital technologies. This presentation will explore whether Apple's iTunes U can provide an effective way for faculty and students to produce, store, access, and distribute digital content. We will describe how faculty from the music, foreign languages, and economics departments collaborated with the Educational Technology Center to pilot iTunesU. Can this "cool" technology meet our institution's digital needs, or will this content-hungry application turn us into Looney Tunes U?

This ECAR research bulletin discusses the adjustments that the Indiana University information technology organization made, and continues to make, in order to support membership in Sakai. It has been said that supporting Sakai can seem like trying to change a tire on a moving car. As co-founder of and active participant in the Sakai collaboration, the effects of IU’s decision—the unexpected, the challenging, and the delightful—are discussed in terms of the intra- and interuniversity realities of highly collaborative efforts.

Citation for this work: Goodrum, David, Jan R. Holloway, Anastasia S. Morrone, Lance Speelmon, and Elizabeth A. Van Gordon. “Dynamics of Supporting Sakai Through Local and Global Collaboration” (Research Bulletin, Issue 11). Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, 2008, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

Multi-touch interfaces are input devices that recognize two or more simultaneous touches, allowing one or more users to interact with computer applications through various gestures created by fingers on a surface. Some devices also recognize differences in pressure and temperature. Multi-touch technology introduces users to swipes, pinches, rotations, and other actions that allow for richer, more immediate interaction with digital content. Multi-touch devices and supporting applications offer diverse ways of visualizing information to improve understanding, and they facilitate new ways to foster collaborative creation, permitting several users to work simultaneously on a single screen.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

Educational games and simulations can engage students in higher-level cognitive thinking, such as interpreting, analyzing, discovering, evaluating, acting, and problem solving. Recent technical advances in multiplayer, user-created virtual worlds have significantly expanded the capabilities of user interaction and development within these simulated worlds. This ability to develop and interact with your own simulated world offers many new and exciting educational possibilities. This article explores the technical capabilities and educational potential of these new worlds. Additionally, it presents and illustrates a model, which uses interaction combinations, to identify course content and topics having educational applications in virtual worlds.

MIT recently completed a benchmark study on the use of educational technology in subjects considered to count toward the core curriculum (General Institute Requirements). This presentation will discuss how the data was collected, analyzed, and implemented.

The meaning of "student" is evolving at Duke University in response to many institutional and faculty outreach efforts. This trend is mirrored at many of Duke’s peer institutions. We see the concept of "learners" expanding beyond traditionally enrolled college students to include community participants, youth enrolled in talent programs, and continuing education students. At the same time, the realm of academic services faculty use for teaching has grown beyond traditional institutionally provided services such as Blackboard to encompass Flickr, blogs, Twitter, and any new technology available to faculty for free. How can we address the expansion in student population and in resources? How do you extend your institution’s computing resources to people outside your campus? How do you extend your local service concepts and policies to the end-user commodity-driven applications that are within any faculty’s reach? Lynne O'Brien and Klara Jelinkova will discuss the issues, concepts, and solutions surrounding identity management proposed and implemented at Duke University.