lauren's library blog

As you might have noticed, I spent yesterday at the Duke CIT Showcase. I attended a bunch of interesting sessions on the Duke Digital Initiatives, video feedback on assignments, alumni readers/critiques, a student’s perspectives of blogs in the classroom, iTunes University, and the physical arrangement of classroom space. James Groom, of the EduPunk movement gave the keynote.

I am constantly impressed with Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology. I’ve been paying attention to them for a few years, but really became a fan after attending last year’s showcase. The showcase is really for the Duke community, though they’re kind enough to invite those of us who do this type of work, too.  The presentations are all by Duke faculty for Duke faculty, focusing on really cutting edge or interesting ways of incorporating new technologies into the classroom. I normally feel really up on this type of thing, but both times I’ve come away with new ideas. The keynote is normally (at least based on the past two) a nationally known innovator in educational technology. They provide lunch, too, and both times I’ve been able to get a vegan box lunch…. something absolutely out of the ordinary at this type of thing. I normally carry food with me everywhere I go because I can never count on a place thinking of the vegans.

And that’s just about the showcase. The CIT provides all kinds of useful services for their community. They help faculty incorporate instructional technology into their courses with an eye for strong pedagogical uses and an emphasis on assessing the results. The people are outstanding, professional, and friendly. Duke is a better institution for having the CIT.

Okay, back to the showcase. From the sessions I attended there were two main themes of the day. 1: There is a benefit to having the “real world” view student work 2: Providing audio feedback allows you to give students more feedback. I am totally down with theme number one. This is why I try to put so much of the courses I work with online in public places. This is one of the reasons I avoid traditional learning management systems (like Blackboard). Point two is new to me. Though I love multimedia, and think of it a lot for student assignments, I hadn’t thought about all that it could provide by incorporating it into my grading. I have a few FERPA related things I want to work through (for example, I would assume spoken comments are FERPA encumbered, so do we have to keep those off the network?) but I definitely want to find ways to incorporate this. It actually reminds me a bit of the old-school tutor model, where you could have conversations with students (or, at least, more conversational feedback).

Out of the showcase came a few things I want to try:

• A syndication plugin for a blog, rather than using FriendFeed, for my next class
• Voice comments in lieu of written comments

Another theme for me, though not a major theme of the showcase, was that information management issues are increasingly intertwined with educational technology issues. Again, this is why I tend to think that librarians are in an excellent place to lead here. Every institution might not be in a place for librarians to take a role (and certainly not all librarians have this background), but at the very least I think there should be some level of collaboration. In the best case scenario, an institution would have librarians with a background that would allow them to lead in these issues. As faculty start having questions about archiving, indexing, and preserving the scholarly material created by a class, we should be ready to answer them.

Great stuff, and certainly worth the drive! Thanks again to the CIT, I look forward to keeping up with what you’re doing next year!

Related posts:

1. instructional design librarian: me
2. technology as community
3. Teaching Teaching
4. tethered technology
5. Use What They Own—Go Where They Are: Plugging Into Student Gadgets and Habitats