I've been somewhat quiet on my blogs of late. I have been working on a few different professional things, so this is a post explaining what these things are. Over the past year and a half, I’ve had a lot of time to write about activities that I did at my previous job. Some of those papers were in review while I was in Barbados, some are a little fresher. Here’s what’s up.
Late last year, I had a short piece in EDUCAUSE Quarterly titled "Increasing Corporate Philanthropy to Enrich Technology Innovation in Higher Education." It's on a topic that has been on my mind for some time, I had tried to get it published in another venue, and finally gave EQ a try. I'm thrilled it made it to the light of day, even though my piece, on how our students and faculty in higher ed do not have the skills needed for a future inundated with technology and that we need to make a priority appropriately educating them in media fluency and that corporations should be helping in this regard, wasn't read by many people. Ridiculously long sentence above aside, please read it and tell me what you think.
After submitting the above paper and while browsing the EDUCAUSE Quarterly issue, I looked at the topics for the 2011 issue and noticed that there was a coming issue devoted to Mobile Computing. I know a thing or two about mobile computing so I hustled and put together a paper for the first issue of EQ. The paper that I had in my mind to write was strictly about work I did with a Biology professor and a research associate in an Ecology class. But I thought that a paper with two or three other colleagues from small liberal arts colleges, would be even more interesting for the readers of EQ, so I contacted some folks I know out there doing interesting things with true mobile computing and teaching and learning in the field and we, in short order, put together a paper called, "The Educational Potential of Mobile Computing in the Field." This paper, if you have not read it, is written with a professor, a field assistant and a librarian, and we are talking about best practices for using a tablet PC in field based classes, some that use GIS and some not. The upshot is that tablet PCs are a pretty effective tool for doing field work. Again, please read it. Please let me know what you think.
A paper that I had written and submitted as a book chapter, that was seemingly never going to come out, I re-submitted to SAA-Archaeological Record. Thankfully, the editor there happily took it. It is called "The Excavation is the Classroom" and it's about, you guessed it, archaeological field work, teaching, and technology....tablet PC technology.
The last two papers are from work that I did with faculty members. I thought it was interesting work. So did they. They are busy and don't have time to write up anything about their teaching efforts because they are taking the time to write up their research efforts. I said I'd take the lead and give a talk and eventually write a paper and they were more than thrilled to let me do that. Think about it. If you go to all the effort to help a professor make something really special happen in the classroom, shouldn't that story be told? Give a talk. Go to a professional meeting, go outside of your discipline of study perhaps, and tell it!
I’ve got another paper in review at the Hacking the Academy book-in-a-week project that sort of goes into this topic, of how academic technology professionals should be academics first and technologists after that somewhere. Still waiting to hear on that project.
I've been asked a couple of times to give talks about the work that I did at the University of the West Indies, in particular on the MarSIS project. A paper from that project, which I went to Mountain View to present at Google, is in the works for the GSA Penrose compendium.
So, to wrap this up and to discuss the point of the title of this post, if you're reading this and you are an instructional technologist, please write about what you're doing. Please tell us about the interesting use of teaching with technology that you've been involved with. We want to learn from you. Share your knowledge.
Pad and pen photo above is CC Flickr image by Tony Hall.
Cat, dog and laptop photo is CC Flickr image by Sara Westermark.
