I had an absolutely great day at my first Teaching and Learning Colloquium here at Stony Brook yesterday. I have more thoughts on the event that I intend to share when I have a little more time to tease them out, but for now here is a quick Storify recap of the day. Without the community contributing tweets and pictures I could not have assembled even this quick recap. I think that is evidence for some that the use of social media is a great way to help capture and share an event.
Presentation
Presentation to Stony Brook Council
This morning I had my first opportunity to address the Stony Brook Council and share with them a bit about the work we do here at the University. I didn’t want to do a standard, “this is IT” update so I tried to share with them a handful of contemporary challenges we face every day across higher education and talk briefly about how we are addressing them. I wanted them to see IT in a different light, as what it really is — an enabler of success on our campus.
To that end I focused my remarks on a few core areas that I thought they might be less likely to associated with IT — teaching and learning, enabling access, security issues, and how we are helping to push the Operational Excellence agenda forward. I tried to keep it light, but also express how much we do to support the teaching, research, service, and administrative missions of the University. I’d be happy to share the presentation either face to face or online at some point.
The talking points for the above slide really made an impact — people don’t think of the utter scale of connectivity we manage every minute on and around our campus. I pointed out that it isn’t just laptops anymore, that it is also phones, tablets, game systems, google glass, and other things consuming our connections throughout the day and night. I think it really hit home just how critical the network is when showed a slide that listed some of the other services that run on the network — door access, ticket sales, security cameras, digital signage, and more.
The other thing that was an interesting was to see the overall reaction to our focus on teaching and learning. They were very impressed with our participation and support of the first SBU MOOC … and I made sure to highlight bot the higher than normal completion rates and the unique local and distance students taking the course. I think it really illustrated how innovative we are. The other tidbit I made sure got in there was the rapid growth in technology supported classrooms … I made the case that technology is truly a competitive advantage on a campus, sometimes tipping a student towards enrolling here.
All in all I felt it was a good conversation and a good way to introduce our work to the Stony Brook Council.
Addressing University Senate
Today at 3:30 I will be addressing the Stony Brook University Senate. I was invited by Senate President, Dr. Fredrick Walters to both introduce myself to the Senate and provide a brief update. I don’t intend to spend more than 10-15 minutes talking, but will be sharing both my observations from the first 8o days here as well as my overall strategic priorities for DoIT.
My DoIT Strategic Priorities
I think it will be interesting to see if there are questions afterwards … and know that I will either update this post or do another one after the fact. I am making an overt offer to attend department meetings and to invite the larger community to attend the Coffee with Cole sessions. Again, we shall see. At the end of the day, I am just honored to have the opportunity to represent DoIT and get to know our University Senate.
Keynote: 5/17/2011: University of Missouri Celebration of Teaching Excellence
I am looking forward to making a return trip to the University of Missouri to provide the keynote talk for their annual “Celebration of Teaching Excellence” event. I haven’t been to Columbia since I did the closing plenary for the first Apple Digital Campus Faculty Academy in April of 2005. It will be an opportunity to connect with old friends and get a look at how another University celebrates teaching and learning with technology.
Last year’s event looks like it was really great.
Presentation: 2/15/2011: Educause Learning Initiative
My friend and colleague, Bart Pursel and I will be sharing what we hope will be a growing body of insights and research related to data analyzed from some of Penn State’s web 2.0 platforms. Our session at ELI is titled, “Exposing Emerging Pedagogies: Can Web 2.0 Tools Influence Teaching and Learning?” We will share stories related to how the Penn State Wikipsaces and the Blogs at Penn State are being used in educational settings through the lens of discoveries from the PSU Data Warehouse.
Closing Plenary: 01/14/2011: Educause Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference
I have been invited to deliver the closing plenary at the 2011 Educause Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference in Baltimore, MD. If That is Scholarship, We Are Doomed! New forms of conversations are emerging across the Web that are shaping the nature of our institutional responsibilities. Remix culture is impacting the future of discourse on levels that make many of us uncomfortable. Let’s explore the notion of the “conversation” as it exists across the social Web — to see how we, as educators, can take cues from this emerging dialogue. It is our responsibility – not to dismiss these discussion forms (and forums) as passing fads, but to realize the embedded pedagogies that exist within these emergent spaces — pedagogies we must understand to fully imagine what the future of digital media means to scholarship.
I took the audio from the session and created an enhanced podcast of it that includes the slides.
Presentation: 11/04/2010: The PSU Educational Technology Ecosystem
My friend and colleague, Bart Pursel and I will be sharing what we hope will be a growing body of insights and research related to data analyzed from some of Penn State’s web 2.0 platforms. We will share stories related to how the Penn State Wikipsaces and the Blogs at Penn State are being used in educational settings through the lens of discoveries from the PSU Data Warehouse. Bart and I are making some very interesting discoveries related to the use of these platforms at the college, curricular, and student level. This is a preview of a presentation recently accepted for ELI 2011.
Invited Presentation: 09/22/2010: Junior Achievement
I have been invited to once again share the recommendations from the Junior Achievement Digital Strategy Task Force that I am a member of. This task force was assembled to assist JA in thinking about how to integrate digital delivery and engagement into their existing infrastructure. I will be co-resenting to the Board of Directors with Dr. John Box of JA.
Download Ja_task_force as a 10 MB PDF.