“Engaging Colleagues” Session Notes
- Using digital portfolios in a department whose chair is highly tech-phobic (refuses to use email, etc.). How do you deal with a situation like that?
- (Faculty engaging student with digital tools are primarily lecturers in the dept.)
- Perhaps the tenured faculty could hold a meeting in which they openly identify the advantages/disadvantages of print and digital media
- Her behavior is not rational, so trying to persuade her otherwise is unlikely
- If your Dean is supportive, then he/she can put pressure on the dept. chair to make incremental changes
- Bringing in recent grads who are working using digital tools to show the benefits of these tools
- How do you encourage faculty who seem to be interested/intrigued by new digital tools, but also seem to be reticent to take the time to learn and then integrate them into their pedagogy?
- (And some people think they know more than they do)
- Is having someone on staff with broad familiarity of applicability of tools to higher ed pedagogy crucial/central to disseminating these tools and practices?
- Jay ___: I am that here at St. Norbert’s. Staff are much more likely to attend workshops than faculty. How do I get them to come in?
- Blake: took long time to feel like they were worth attending.
- Mentoring new faculty could be a way to encourage attendance
- There needs to be incentives on both sides for it to work, though
- Cross-departmental mentoring helps new faculty see connections between disciplines
- Why isn’t there a “help desk” for integration of digital tools into pedagogy?
- In building inter-disciplinary minors organized around digital networked media, there is a huge coordination problem. How do you balance resources, including hardware, software, and participants time?
- Finding the right collaboration tool is probably important: meetings may not necessarily be the best way to get something like that going.
- Email is also not the best; it must have a group collaboration component.
- Does anyone use collaborative software within their department, perahps even in lieu of dept. meetings?
- Sharepoint, though it’s a pain (and Microsoft empire).
- Google Docs…
- Working on such projects with colleagues crosses into territorial issues about authorship
- There needs to be some kind of understanding about the appropriateness of such changes
- It can be wonderful, in that your colleagues(s) are like little elves who come in to help you further your work, just when your energy is flagging
- Facebook Groups’ new mechanic allows for friendships to develop more casually (can be closed, notifies you when new posts arrive)
- What about a retreat during the summer to work out the logistics?
- You might even be able to get day-rate funding from your institution as an incentive
- Or perhaps a grant
- (It seems like support community-building
- How is hardware shared on different campuses?
- Shared pool: priority-based; some campus groups have higher priority
- better equipment, but sometimes less access
- Library controlled: reservations are first-come, first served
- limited number of devices (laptop, ipad)
- Media Studies dept. controlled: single faculty member, loans made on casual basis
- Easy to get access because single faculty member is open to it, but can be a drain on his time
- Availability of IT resources can be very limited on some campuses. Is anyone familiar with the WW3 network?
- It’s an attempt to build a Web around scholarly tools only
- One prominent issue often raised when institutions consider making significant changes is focusing on changing/updating the Humanities (as opposed to Sciences and Social Sciences). How do we keep Humanities faculty from hearing that focus articulated as “in the future, you will all become Media Studies faculty”?
- Strength in Numbers: early adopters participate in pilot testing, and then they become advocates of ways to use those tools and practices in pedagogy.
- If you say, “everyone will need to know this,” it’s less effective than if you provide colleagues with assistance with ways to introduce change
- Again, face to face gatherings help to build community
- (like Final Cut Pro User Groups)
- Allowing people to give a “like” or thumbs up by regularly posting about such gatherings to a blog or listserve seems to really help approval rates
