Overview Last month I participated in what was one of the strongest webinars the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative has put out thus far—a two-hour session on the various means through which the ed tech community is assessing the quality of (new) digital education initiatives. Conceived as part show-and-tell, part commentary on the state of the field,… Continue reading →
What if you held a conference about higher education without any educators present? Who is present at educational technology events? The absence of faculty from these discussions is commonly bemoaned as an intractable, unsolvable problem. What isn’t often presented, however, is an iterative solution that will allow for a slow-but-steady integration of technology and teaching.… Continue reading →
Initiating new technologies into complex institutions can be a challenge, especially when hundreds of users with varying technical skills, disciplinary approaches, and time commitments are involved. Integrating new technologies into teaching and pedagogical practices within widely disparate experience groups only increases that challenge. Creativity, innovation – and skill – can grow organically with “passionate users”… Continue reading →
The EDUCAUSE Review (online, January 12, 2015) reflected on top ten technology issues facing higher education in 2015, considering these to have “reached an inflection point—the point at which the trends that have dominated thought leadership and have motivated early adopters are now cascading into the mainstream.” Each issue identified has value in relation to… Continue reading →
A number of bloggers have begun making their end-of-year ed tech lists already, including Audrey Watters, Eric Stoller, and the ProfHacker team. There are some odd commonalities on these lists, and it’s unclear whether or not that’s due to my own self-selected reading patterns, or broader trends in higher ed that extend beyond any one individual.… Continue reading →
An intriguing option for developing video-based content at UO can be seen in a system recently and successfully deployed at Penn State University. The One Button Studio is a simplified video recording setup that can be used without any previous video production experience. The design of the studio allows the user to create high-quality and… Continue reading →
The question that lies behind much of the discussion of digital resources at UO is a question of audience. Just who do our online courses serve? What audiences have we overlooked? It’s not just questions of popularity, but of targeted outreach and advertising, or of partnering with members of those desired audiences to make future ventures… Continue reading →
Kassia and Lindsey were in Portland last week for the NorthWest Academic Computing Consortium‘s annual Instructional Technology Roundtable. The downtown Portland setting was an energizing one–it gave Lindsey, InTRO’s NYC refugee, a little taste of home! The roundtable is a small regional conference geared towards instructional technology practitioners. While overall numbers are small–roughly fifty people… Continue reading →
InTRO hosted its first on-campus event as an office at the end of October: we coordinated the University of Oregon’s participate in the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI)’s Fall Focus webinar, which were all about active learning spaces and creative classroom technologies! “Reimagining Learning Spaces: Design, Technology, and Assessment” was a two-day webinar featuring speakers from… Continue reading →
In the October issue of eCampus News there’s a very nice summary of a study conducted by Dr. Kristen Betts of Drexel University on the faculty of Armstrong Atlantic State University. This study built upon a 1997 study conducted at George Washington University, updating the original GWU survey instruments in order to capture usefully comparable… Continue reading →
