Lightening Talk
Tim Galow, John Garrison, Phil Krejcarek and Terri Johnson,
Carroll University
Biographies
Tim Galow oversees the Professional Writing major at Carroll. In this role, he faces the challenge of incorporating ever-changing technologies into the classroom and promoting their use to students and to composition instructors.
John Garrison is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English. Prior to joining Carroll’s faculty last year, he was selected as a fellow by the California Humanities Institute to seek out, document, and replicate best practices across the University of California system that utilized digital technologies for enhanced teaching, learning, and scholarship. At Carroll, he serves as both a campus-wide technology fellow and a member of the Technology, Teaching and Learning committee.
Phil Krejcarek is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, as well as a practicing artist working in photography. Currently, he is enrolled in Carroll’s “Mobile Boot Camp,” a year-long program that investigates the educational possibilities for the iPad in the classroom.
Terri Johnson holds a Ph.D. in political science and is an award-winning teacher and scholar of teaching. Diving into a second career, Terri serves as Director of the Center for Educational Technology & Innovation (CETI) at Carroll University, where she has helped lead efforts to meet faculty where they learn.
Abstract
Since HASTAC started 10 years ago, educators have witnessed technology’s increasing and pervasive integration into campus life. It is hard to imagine any classroom, course, or campus event that has not been influenced, enhanced, or otherwise transformed by technology. At the same time, this onset of new ways of working has brought (often entirely justified) criticism and skepticism.
Most of us have spent a tremendous amount of time, money, and effort looking for ways to increase digital knowledge and cultivate skills for twenty-first-century students. Of course, this remains a vital charge among educators. But faculty also must continually learn and – as technology evolves – demand new modalities for acquiring 21st-century skills and knowledges. This involves more than understanding the latest content delivery mechanisms for face-to-face, hybrid, or online courses. How do we teach our instructors the expanding conceptual language of digital competencies, such as “tools,” “collaboration,” “crowdsourcing,” “cloud storing and sharing”? How do we ask technically innovative faculty to continue innovating and our more entry-level faculty to see past barrier to entry? How do we reduce burnout, resist stasis, and avoid alienating the uninitiated?
It won’t happen in a one-hour training session or a 4-hour workshop. It won’t happen through administrative mandates. We don’t often apply many of our own learning theories to faculty, but why not? Why not practice what we preach? Why not develop purposeful initiatives to guide our faculty through rethinking their pedagogy and provide a safe place to practice and fail at technology alongside their peers?
This lightning panel, led by Dr. Terri Johnson, will share how initiatives to engage faculty in new ways of teaching have played out on the Carroll University campus. Joined by faculty from across disciplines, Terri will invite each panel member to present – in lighting fashion – how these initiatives have changed their approaches to education and to cultivating educational cultures in diverse environs across campus. We will share how several programs at our small liberal arts college have changed faculty perspectives and in turn evolved pedagogy campus-wide.
Each panel member will share evocative attempts:
• to impact teaching and learning
• to improve pedagogy
• to change approaches to both student and faculty research
• and to evangelize innovative and measurable uses of technology across campus.
Indeed, many of these new ways of working, teaching, and learning are ones we could not have envisioned ten, five or even one year(s) ago.