It is June and the weather is glorious here in Syracuse. We've waited so long for this. It was a "long, cold lonely winter." But the need to keep retooling for what happens on campus between September and May doesn't necessarily stop for truly fine weather.
This week, 18 SU faculty–from recently arrived assistant professors to long-Orange full professors–are participating in the Summer Institute for Technology Enhanced Teaching and Learning (SITETL). Five days, 8:30 a.m. to 4-ish.
This experience will probably be like many intense bootcamp/mini-courses: a time-release pill. Dive into the rapid flow, let it wash over you, try to come up for air to reflect and paddle about on one's own by trying these new technologies out at night (despite exhaustion), think ahead as to how all or some of it might mesh with existing practice . . . take lots of notes.
The true "takeaways" from SITETL probably won't be knowable until after the Institute has ended and the ramp-up for Fall 2014 is underway.
On Day 1, we have been bombarded with new terms and significant concepts: Symbaloo, personal learning environments, Evernote, paperless classes, webmix, Alone Together, landing page, widget, layouts, Adobe Connect, pods and rooms. A score of 61 on the Pew "How Millennial Are You?" Quiz. http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/how-millennial-are-you/
The instructors are great and–thankfully–there are a lot of them. We are working hand's-on with all sorts of tools. The beginnings of a pedagogic philosophy to motivate all of this is being erected, too. Do not simply use the technology because it is there, but think about the costs and benefits, and the value-added. Think about why this might be worth the investment of time to put in place . . . because there are start-up costs and there can be a relatively steep learning curve involved with some of this stuff.
As a sidebar, discussing who Millennials are as learners and discovering how that relates to Syracuse University has sparked lots of thoughts about:
1) SU's admissions/marketing strategy,
2) the implications this has for what gets done in the classroom, and
3) how the institution needs to adjust to a multi-faceted Millennial Student/Late-Boomer Aspirational Parent reality.
Will this discussion become an agenda item for the SU Senate Committee on Instruction for 2014-15? Given that the chair of the Agenda Committee and two members of the Committee on Instruction are SITETL participants, the odds are high.
One aspect that ought to be addressed is the implications that No Child Left Behind holds, and Common Core will most likely hold for Higher Ed. It is not simply an issue of what Millennials like to do and how they engage with technology and information, but also one of how they have been educated K-12. Since the early 2000s, public school learners have been existing in a world of standardized testing in preparation for the great standardized exit/entrance exams: SAT, ACT, AP. By their own admission, students tell me that they are great bubble-test takers and bulleted answer-writers, but still feel mighty uncomfortable about writing essays as term papers or on the fly with exams. That, in many school systems, simply has not been stressed very much.
Now, Common Core is supposed to be about "college readiness"–but what does that mean and how does it relate to what actually goes on in our individual classrooms, our departments and programs, and Syracuse University? We've learned this week that we are increasingly becoming a "national" school drawing from 50 states. . . if that is the case, then we are dealing with–at minimum–fifty different variants of NCLB and soon . . . 46 (and decreasing) variants of CC. Add on top of that the students who are coming from parochial and private school, who have set their own standards. This also adds diversity to the student population that is different from various subject categories related to income, race, gender, etc.
SITETL has been a meaningful experience thus far . . . after only one day!
The challenges: translating all that I'm learning into practice. And learning how to put a hyperlink into a WordPress page.
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