How can we exploree merging technologies without an emerging technology budget?
Build money into your yearly budget to explore new technologies (software and human costs) AND build an incremental budget to maintain these technologies year after year...
On many if not most American campuses, the learning technology support unit is staffed by experts in instructional design. By contrast, the majority of our staff are themselves faculty who hold terminal degrees in their respective disciplines, and are teachers of many years’ experience, including both online and blended modes of instruction.
Because of our extensive experience of best instructional practices, we focus on pedagogy rather than upon technology per se. More to the point, we emphasize learning technologies which foster active learning and the building of a peer learning community both in the classroom and online.
Moreover, because our staff are not primarily technologically oriented, we are not a production unit. Instead, we teach instructors to become independent users of their own learning technologies. This in its turn bears strongly upon our choice of supported technologies: although we constantly experiment with emerging technologies, we are not proponents of the latest and greatest. We support basic technologies of proven pedagogical value for mainstream faculty users.
From a broader perspective, on many other campuses, a support unit like ours is embedded in the IT organization for that campus. Because of our emphasis on pedagogy, however, we report instead to our Center for Instructional and Pedagogical Development (CIPD), and in its turn, to Academic Affairs.
Finally, the location of the LTC on the UWM campus is both symbolic and practical. Our position in the Golda Meir Library expresses our fundamental commitment to the heart of the academy. Our location near the campus center makes it convenient for faculty to drop in for consultations and workshops.
And it works! Our surveys show that the LTC has interacted with 80% of the more than 1500 faculty, teaching academic staff, and teaching assistants on the UWM campus. The most favorable instructor impressions of the LTC? That we are teachers who understand the classroom, and that our turnaround time for requests is outstanding.
Philosophy:First, you establish your learning goals for the course. What should students know, understand and be able to do? And how do you prioritize and narrow down the content you want to teach so it fits within the limited framework of the course? Wiggins and McTighe provide a useful process for establishing curricular priorities. They suggest you ask yourself three questions as you progressively focus in on the most valuable content:
What should participants hear, read, view, explore or otherwise encounter? This knowledge is “worth being familiar with.”
What knowledge and skills should participants master? Sharpen your choices by considering what is “important to know and do” for your students. What facts, concepts and principles should they know? What processes, strategies and methods should they learn to use?
What are big ideas and important understandings participants should retain? These choices are the “enduring understandings” that you want students to remember after they’ve forgotten the details of the course.
Answering each of these questions will help you determine the best content for your course, and create concrete, specific learning goals for your students.
II. Determine acceptable evidence.
In the second phase of Backward Design, you think about how you will decide if students are starting to master the knowledge and skills you want them to gain. What will you accept as evidence that students are making progress toward the learning goals of the course? How will you know if they are “getting it”?
When planning how you will collect this evidence, consider a wide range of assessment methods (for example, essay tests, term papers, short-answer quizzes, homework assignments, lab projects, problems to solve, etc.) in order to ensure that you test for exactly the learning you want them to gain. In other words, sometimes our assessments don’t match our learning goals and we therefore cannot attain the evidence we want.
For example, if one of your goals is for student to learn how to problem-solve, give them an assessment that requires a demonstration of their problem-solving skills. Have them write out each step they took in addressing the problem, and an explanation of why they took it, instead of simply providing the right answer.
III. Plan learning experiences & instruction.
Finally, after you have decided what results you want and how you will know you’ve achieved them, then you start planning how you’re going to teach. You can now move to designing your instructional strategies and students’ learning activities. What are the best exercises, problems or questions for developing your students’ ability to meet your learning goals? How can they practice using new knowledge to gain the skills you want them to learn? How can they apply their learning? Devise active and collaborative exercises that encourage students to grapple with new concepts in order to “own” them. You want to foster increasing understanding, not rote memorization.
Identifying Results: Learning ObjectivesThere are six levels in the taxonomy, moving through the lowest order processes to the highest:
McTigue and Wiggins developed a multifaceted view of what makes up a mature understanding, a six-sided view of the concept. The six facets are most easily summarized by specifying the particular achievement each facet reflects. When we truly understand, we
Can explain: provide thorough, supported, and justifiable accounts of phenomena, facts, and data.
Can interpret: tell meaningful stories; offer apt translations; provide a revealing historical or personal dimension to ideas and events; make it personal or accessible through images, anecdotes, analogies, and models.
Can apply: effectively use and adapt what we know in diverse contexts.
Have perspective: see and hear points of view through critical eyes and ears; see the big picture.
Can empathize: find value in what others might find odd, alien, or implausible; perceive sensitively on the basis of prior direct experience.
Have self-knowledge: perceive the personal style, prejudices, projections, and habits of mind that both shape and impede our own understanding; we are aware of what we do not understand and why understanding is so hard.
These facets are different but related, in the same way that different criteria are used in judging the quality of a performance. For example, "good essay writing" is composed of persuasive, organized, and clear prose. All three criteria need to be met, yet each is different from and somewhat independent of the other two. The writing might be clear but unpersuasive; it might be well organized but unclear and somewhat persuasive.
Similarly, a student may have a thorough and sophisticated explanation but not be able to apply it, or see things from a critical distance but lack empathy. The facets reflect the different connotations of understanding we considered in the previous chapter, yet a complete and mature understanding ideally involves the full development of all six kinds of understanding.
Student-Centered
As previously discussed in this column, when it comes to Twitter, there is no “right way” to do things. Learning the right balance of tweets, re-tweets and replies to meet your needs and increase your return on (time) investment is a learning process like any other. For this column, I’ve compiled a list of educators and technologists that I look to as good examples of using Twitter in an approachable way to network, share, learn and grow.
