Podcasts and Faculty Development

In this podcast, we feature an eight minute interview with Bradley A. Cohen, Assistant Director and Coordinator for Curriculum Development at the University of Minnesota. This interview was recorded at the 2007 ELI Fall Focus Session in Boulder, Colorado where Mr. Cohen presented a session entitled, "Faculty Development and the Net Savvy Student".

Brad Cohen discusses the digital divide and shares guiding principles the University of Minnesota uses to deliver an integrated suite of faculty development programs designed to help faculty meet the needs of net savvy students. The University of Minnesota's approach is informed by the data routinely collected from their students and faculty, the literature, and their practice.

Claremont McKenna College's FITness program (Fitness In Technology) allowed faculty to rapidly integrate teaching with technology and help struggling students catch up. Grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Fletcher Jones Foundation funded specialized programs to help students meet faculty expectations of their technical knowledge, skill, and application. It's a unique approach that garnered unanimous faculty buy-in.

In this 14 minute interview with Mike Malsed, Assistant Director for Student Technology Services at Claremont McKenna College, he discusses the development, implementation, and success of the FITness program. The conversation was recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Western Regional Conference in San Francisco, California where Mike was delivering a presentation entitled, From FITness to Fantasy Congress: The Growth of FITness Within Faculty and Student Projects.

I interviewed Chris Dede, the Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, on some of the ideas behind his upcoming keynote address at the 2007 ELI Annual Meeting. Dede will conduct the general session scheduled for 8:00-9:30 AM on Tuesday, January 23; his topic will be "Emerging Educational Technologies and Neomillennial Learning Styles."

In this discussion, Dede explains the concept and key characteristics of "neomillennials." He also highlights the transformative effect of emerging immersive learning environments on higher education pedagogy and discusses the importance of faculty development in relation to these developments. Finally, he briefly touches on the National Science Foundation's cyberinfrastructure initiative as a significant topic he won't be able to cover in depth in Atlanta. However, he cites the November 2006 ELI Web Seminar he conducted on the cyberinfrastructure initiative as a resource for those interested in learning more about it.

In this recording, Allan sits down with the 2005 EDUCAUSE Teaching and Learning Award Winners from Virginia Tech to chat about their faculty development program.

Our ongoing podcast coverage of the Midwest Regional Conference continues as Sharon McCurdy and Raymond E. Schroeder cover Inter-Institutional Class Collaborations Online.

Our audio feed was plauged by a high degree of interference, but I think was able to filter out enough for this to be consider acceptable quality. I'd really like your feedback on this.

Thanks to Tom Stamm for providing the music in this podcast under a Creative Commons license.

Attached is a sixteen minute MP3 of a series of post conference interviews with the NLII Student Panel and their colleagues. Among other things, sessions on Personal Response Systems (aka Clickers) by M. Javed Iqbal and Security, Privacy and Copyright by Rodney Petersen were of particular interest.

This is my first podcast, so bear with me if you encounter any problems. It has been years since my days in the studio as a student editing digital audio using ProTools on Mac. For this podcast, I used Audacity to edit the recordings, AKG C 1000S microphone, and a Dell Axim Pocket PC with Core Sound's PDAudio Compact Flash Card and a Denecke AD-20 mic preamp/analog-to-digital converter.

It certainly isn't as polished as the MP3s from Kyle, Sarah and the gang at Mizzou, but hopefully it will prove of some interest and value to many out there in the blogosphere. I would definitely like to get any feedback you have.  

Thanks for your time!

Matt

BTW, thanks to Tom Hoffman who aptly pointed out the we aren't automatically including a link to our podcasts in the body of our RSS. We'll certainly get that resolved in the next update of our software. Thanks Tom!