Presented at EDUCAUSE Annual Conferences and Instructional Technologies

Blogs, wikis, and networking tools appear to gain widespread acceptance. How are higher education professionals using social software tools in their practice? Is there any convergence with what students using them bring to the institution? We will invite participation to explore these questions and determine if there are international differentiators.

As a takeoff on the popular reality TV series Project Runway, Project Technology follows six faculty during a school year as they attempt to effectively integrate technology into their teaching to enhance student learning. Session attendees will learn and see firsthand how faculty members struggled with and mastered new technologies.

This session will cover lessons learned and best practices for creating highly interactive, student-centered, rich-media online courses with customizable and mobile learning using Mediasite video streaming and video and audio podcasting. It will include a tour of a course Web site, 10 principles for good practice for innovative online education, and a course design toolkit.

What information technologies are used by undergraduates? How does IT contribute to their academic experiences and learning? What has changed since 2005? ECAR presents key findings from the fourth annual survey of undergraduates, with responses from 27,846 students at 103 higher education institutions. Plans for 2008 will also be discussed.

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.

Personal authoring technologies have made it easier than ever for instructors and students to contribute their thoughts, experiences, and opinions to a global discourse. In addition, these technologies provide a rich opportunity for instructors to focus their students' attention on discipline-specific questions related to a single course or topic.

This seminar will give attendees valuable "face time" with blogs, wikis, and podcasts in order to critically assess their instructional value and creative potential, as well as the IT infrastructure required to support them. We will demonstrate the numerous technologies UW-Madison is using, discuss the pedagogical application and assessment of these technologies, present an overview of IT support challenges, and provide hands-on experiences with the production of blogs, wikis, and podcasts. The seminar will conclude with a discussion of other personal authoring technologies emerging on the educational horizon.

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.

The Kentucky Community and Technical College system has implemented an Interactive Digital Center focused on digital content creation, visualization systems integration, simulation, and digital learning. This session will provide an overview of how the IDC is also focused on application development, training, integration, and deployment of visualization technologies.

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.

The growth and evolution of learning technologies challenges institutions to keep pace with emerging pedagogies and learning environments while making them relevant to their core missions, goals, and challenges. This applied session looks at institutional models of best practice and their approach to diffusion and institutionalization of innovation theory. Planning strategies for successful identification, selection, and implementation of learning technologies will be reviewed. The EDUCAUSE "grand challenges" initiative will serve as the session's backdrop, as we explore some of higher education's access, retention, affordability, and accountability issues. Selected models of best practice will focus on demonstrating success in how information and learning technology can make a difference together with organizational leadership in addressing these issues.