Instructional Technologies and Presentations/Speeches

What research tells us about learning and how that can and should be used to guide the design and use of educational technology. This was the Keynote session from the 2008 Colorado Learning and Teaching with Technology Conference (COLTT).

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?

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.

This presentation will show participants how to use Web 2.0 social networking tools like LiveJournal and free online media content (podcasts and short films) to create dynamic learning communities. We will look at specific examples of how to integrate Web 2.0 in face-to-face, hybrid, and fully online courses.

Turn high tech into "my tech" with a free Gmail account to access and use Google's free power tools! You don't need to be a web developer to manage your classroom, committee, and department digital files online. Learn how to apply Google's free tools to your everyday needs.

The Information Literacy Program at Otis College is a collaboration between faculty and librarians that includes multimedia tutorials, learning objects, podcasts, and YouTube videos. This presentation will describe how the program was developed and embedded in courses, demonstrate some of the instructional technologies used, and discuss the assessment processes and results.