Teaching in Higher Education (The) Forum: Keeping ihe Touch in Technology

Citation

Stahr, B. (2003), "Teaching in Higher Education (The) Forum: Keeping ihe Touch in Technology", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 20 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2003.23920gac.002

Teaching in Higher Education (The) Forum: Keeping ihe Touch in Technology

Beth Stahr

The Sixth Annual Teaching in Higher Education (THE) Forum was held April 28-29, 2003 at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, preceded by a half-day pre-conference workshop on April 27.

This annual conference focuses on technology in higher education, and is sponsored by the Louisiana State University (LSU) Centers for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT). CELT is comprised of three separate Centers: The Center for Faculty Development, The Center for Electronic Learning, and The Center for Assessment and Evaluation. THE Forum is designed to recognize excellent teaching in higher education using technological innovation and to highlight the upcoming trends for technology in academia. Each year THE Forum has grown in size and scope. This year those who pre-registered for the conference came from 25 states. Much of the credit for organizing the growing event goes to Dr Barbara G. Danos, Conference Coordinator.

The 2003 Conference theme was "The knowledge enterprise: new century learning". Issues covered included:

• •

  In what ways are we being challenged to reach beyond the traditional boundaries of teaching and learning?

• •

  Do we see colleagues and ourselves as lifelong learners along with our students?

• •

  What risks are involved in becoming knowledge entrepreneurs on our campuses?

• •

  How can technology foster the dissemination of pedagogical practice as scholarly process?

• •

  How do we fulfill our responsibility to assess our entrepreneurial learning initiatives?

Traditional 30-minute individual or team presentations constituted the majority of the sessions. However, conference planners also gave presenters the opportunity to propose 30-minute individual or team presentations involving a project supported by a Louisiana Board of Regents (BoR) Distance Education Initiative (DEI) Grant, Poster Sessions, 30-minute inTech team presentations that described how faculty and commercial technology vendors work together to enhance the academic experience, and the new Faculty Learning Conversations (FLC) that included online discussions before and after the Conference.

Conference organizers offered the following five topics for the new FLC format:

1. 1.

   Creating an online learning environment’for deep learning.

2. 2.

   Assessing student learning in the electronic learning environment.

3. 3.

   Promoting the scholarship of teaching and learning in the electronic learning environment.

4. 4.

   Envisioning institutional and system-wide e-learning programs and policy directions.

5. 5.

   Integrating instructional technology through faculty development training initiatives.

Each year THE Forum includes real and virtual presentations by the innovators in academic technology. This year's pre-conference workshop on "Online teaching strategies that promote mindfulness of students" was led by Dr Peter Doolittle, Assistant Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Dr Doolittle also presented a plenary session at the Conference entitled "Cognition, thought and meaning: a practical foundation for the integration of teaching, learning, and technology".

Three additional plenary sessions were offered:

1. 1.

   A panel on experts discussed "Major e-knowledge initiatives: what impact are they having on the enterprise?" The panel featured Anne H. Margulies, Executive Director of OpenCourseWare and Dr Phillip D. Long, Senior Strategist, Academic Computing Enterprise, both at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dr’Anne H. Moore, Associate Vice-President for Learning Technologies and Director of Information Technology Initiatives at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. This trio discussed innovative technologies, including the Math Emporium, the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) and OpenCourseWare.

2. 2.

   Dr Nishikant Sonwalkar, Principal Educational Architect of the Academic Media Production Services at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and creator of the pedagogical learning cube, presented a plenary session presentation entitled "Paradigm-shift: reinventing pedagogical framework for technology-enabled education".

3. 3.

   An interdisciplinary panel of Stanford University faculty who incorporate high-tech methods into their courses using Stanford's state-of-the-art Center for Innovations in Learning demonstrated their electronic teaching via an Internet2 connection. Panel participants included Dr Renate Fruchter, Senior Research Engineer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Dr Charles Kerns, Education Technology Manager of the Course Work Project, Dr’Larry Leifer Founding and Current Director’of the Center for Design Research, Dr Timothy Lenoir,’Professor of History and Chair of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science, Dr’Andrea Lunsford, Professor of English and Director of the Program’in Writing and Rhetoric and Dr Stephen Monismith, Professor’of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Current Director of the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory.

In total, 75 concurrent sessions, presented by 137 educators, were packed into this two-day conference. Most sessions presented examples of how individual educators had creatively utilized technology in their courses or the benefits of using technology to reach a target student population.

Of special interest to librarians were the sessions: "Louisiana information literacy tutorial for distance education students" by Beth Namei and Janet’Murphy of the University of New Orleans, "Virtual reference – better learning through cyberspace" by J.B.’Hill and Beth Stahr of Southeastern Louisiana University, and the poster session "Library of the future: new technology at LSU's Middleton Library" by Jason Martin of Louisiana State University.

Librarians who teach stand-alone bibliographic instruction sessions or credit-bearing information literacy courses benefited from the general pedagogical presentations and the sessions on distance education delivery, computer programming techniques, learning styles, course management software, and service learning using technology. Librarians who serve distance learners and distance faculty benefited from the state-of-the-art and even futuristic technologies being used at prestigious institutions like Virginia Tech, MIT and Stanford. Venturing into the e-classroom with these technologists was a worthwhile endeavor for an academic librarian. This out-of-the-library-stacks conference provided an exciting view into the larger world of higher ed. technology.

This year, the organizers plan to publish conference proceedings for selected presentations online. Information about this conference, its online proceedings and future updates concerning the 2004 THE Forum will be available at the Centers for Excellence in Learning and Teaching's home page, www.celt.lsu.edu/

Beth Stahr(bstahr@selu.edu) is Reference/Distance Learning Librarian, Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond, Louisiana, USA.