The 12/10 Conspiracy: Guiding Faculty and Staff Exploration of Web 2.0 as Learning Tools

Presentation given by FR Nordengren, Des Moine University.  He is an education technology strategist and works in the college of health sciences.  His job: Assess student engagement with technology, find out how we can maximize the current tools we use.  Create a formal faculty mentoring program. 

23 Things - Helene Blowers (Librarian) She set up a way for staff to study 23 contemporary tools on the web, they were incentivised and challenged to learn about these tools.

He decided that he needed the FedEx arrow (look between the e and the x) - if you have no budget and you need a person to think about your product, tell them that whenver they see the fedex arrow to think about the product. 

So borrowing from these two sources, he came up with 12 resonable tools to represent what Web 2.0 is all about - that the faculty could review, research, study in 10 months.  Things such as RSS feeds, google documents, blogger page, flakes, google alerts, tagging information, podcasting, facebook, wikipedia, flickr, ect.

A Terradiddle - story of nonsense. He gave an example of this by picking 12 random people and tied them all together by dates, and random data he found on each of them, thereby creating a "consipiracy theory!"

THIS WAS HILARIOUS. (wish this presentation was video taped)

However, the point was made.  He created 12/10 lunch and learns (starting at 12:10 p.m, of course).  For instance, he gives an overview of three tools which will help them organize their use of web 2.0 tools, such as Onebook. In a lunch and learn you can only give a brief overview of what these tools can do. He then waits to see if they want more in-depth training on the tool. 

Technology boot camps was the strategic plan.  Implement an instructional technology assessment, they also had a reorganization of their institutional computing department into information technology services. You must ask yourself does your organization agree on what educational technology is??  or do you have different definitions for it?  They conducted a study to find out about the schools technology users.  He showed a Pew/Internet study about the categories of typical information technology users and showed a breakdown germain to Des Moine university faculty and students.  He then asked about the availability of contemporary hardware/software solutions.  They found that the students found their own solutions for use of Web 2.0. Whereas, faculty depended upon IT for their hardware/software solutions.

Conclusions:

• Faculty mentoring must be a personalized process.  A one size boot camp won't work.
• High yeild does not equal high competence with a tool ... even though they may use a tool, they don't know how to use it properly.  For instance, linking instead of embedding, etc.
• They are still defining what 'basic' skills are

IT Competencies, Information Literacy Skills, Online Interactions, Critical Thinking, Knowledge management; These are areas or skills that they encourage faculty to learn more.  They ask faculty to learn or develop these skills and give them incentives for doing so (he did not say what the incentives were).   Someone in the audience uses the tenure process as an incentive for participation in this type of learning.

Really great presentation!  Good pace, good information, great speaker.