Preconference session - one good, one hmm

OK - time to get some homework done

Morning preconference was "What is your ETA? ...Emerging Technologies Assessment for Academic Technology Professionals" - basically about how a uni chooses which emerging technologies to pursue and a process for planning, review and evaluation. Session by Ohio State and was really good and very useful - not really about new technologies at all - really about decision making processes, planning, piloting etc but in the context where you probably don't have the luxury of year long evaluation pilots - definitely transferrable. We did some stakeholder analysis activities with card sorting techniques and a johari window type model that I think is worth repeating back at SHU and I'd like us to have a look at some of the process mapping, decision triggers stuff too - intially I thought "this would be great for CDT" and it still would but not exclusively. A nice feature of the workshop (and if you bear in mind previous blog rants I've had in the past) was that the presenters had done some additional preparation beforehand and pre-allocated groups based upon type and size of institution so that there may be more opportunities for sharing easily transferrable experiences. We'll get a link to all the resources used and produced in the workshop after the conference, anyone interested in knowing more - let me know.

Second pre-conference - Faculty Development for the New Millenium (U of Minnesota) - now don't get me wrong, there wasn't anything really wrong with the session and my table group were great (I think the word is diverse...one institution with over 100 campuses, one institution with less than 2,000 students, someone from Uni of Alaska with really fascinating issues, one that had just had its "LTI" closed cos the VC and PVC believed that if staff were clever enough to have a PhD they don't need any help in doing something as simple as teaching, and some funny English woman who no one could understand). The presenters focused the session on their programmatic approach to faculty development - which was interesting enough although nothing really that unusual - what I couldn't see any evidence of was the "new millenium" bit - just standard new staff support, focused workshops, development grants, personal fellowships - also it seems weird to me to be talking about a "new millenium" when it isn't so new anymore.

Some interesting snippets (that aren't about the core theme) - they use Bb Vista, Moodle and approx 8 other associated tools eg blogs, wikis, breeze etc - and to support the instructional technology piece they have 17 instructional designers and content developers and 8 (yes, 8) systems administrators.

Also they do student and faculty expectation surveys every 2 years and report on them (I liked the format on this a lot) - the 2007 reports are:

21st Century Instructors at the U of Minnesota (Faculty Educational Technology Survey 2007)

Net Generation Students at the U of Minnesota (Student Educational Technology Survey 2007)

Previous surveys and a whole host of other things are available at their website if you are interested:
http://dmc.umn.edu/ which interestingly demonstrates a lot more new millenium techniques than the session suggested.