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Feeling Like a Pony Express Rider? Uh Oh, Here Comes the Telegraph
5/12/2004
Their most interesting recommendations, however, are in a category they call "Culture surrounding technology." Those are mostly intradepartmental and have very much to do with the faculty. And these recommendations help emphasize that some basic strategic/academic planning can help most departments with their technology issues without really engaging the IT folks much at all. One of their major findings is that teaching is "an isolating experience" and that some intradepartmental tools can help overcome that. They recommend:
· Departmental Web sites: Better use of departmental Web sites for communicating to faculty, including up-to-date concrete examples of how peers in the department are using learning technologies;
· Personal profiles: Finding ways to help even the least savvy faculty share their experiences with technology;
· Informal events: Perhaps having physical or virtual "brown bag" lunches where faculty share info or hear informal presentations from others; and
· Incentives: That same old bugaboo, faculty who spend a lot of time on technologies don't get the kind of credit for it they need, for their own motivation and for tenure
So, what is there to learn from this for the IT professionals on campus? Well, maybe we have to be "outside consultants" and help the academics with an age-old problem: The problem of connecting the mission of the institution with the design and implementation of the institution's infrastructure is alive and well. Without an academic plan for the institution, or for the department, it's really hard to be sure that resources are being appropriately applied-whether the resources are classroom space or network bandwidth.
Maybe it's time for IT folks to memorize a phrase and use it whenever they are asked to create a new resource, purchase one, or support one: "How d'es this fit in with your/our department's academic/strategic plan? What? You don't have one? Well, we need you to have one so that we can make the best decisions for you." That might not immediately change anything, but it's hard to argue with.
Reference
Gustafson, Kimberly. The Impact of Technologies on Learning. Planning
for Higher Education (December 2003-February 2004; Vol. 32 #2) pp. 37-43
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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