About

Our Education Program is exploring new uses of technology in instruction, assignments, and communication. Some efforts include making use of real-time chat rooms, experimenting with Twitter in academic courses, developing a database of digital assignments (e.g., video projects, timeline projects, audio and podcasting projects) that make use of technologies to provide faculty and students with ideas for innovative project formats, and exploring how social media could be used in our courses and program. Additionally, we are exploring ways to use technology with partner sites in K12 schools that are (relatively) nearby and some that are much farther away, such as in Ghana.

Efforts have also been made to incorporate more technology-based options into our central student portfolio assignment and to expand our e-portfolio options. We wish to enhance our students’ comfort with theories and applications related to educational technology — to empower and better enable them to act as technological agents who can use technology to create social change by transforming educational opportunities to meet the needs of people in an increasingly digital, and complex, world. We are especially intrigued by ways in which computer-mediated approaches can both serve and modify the goals of conversation, collaboration, critique, and reflective revision that we see at the heart of educational and liberal studies. We are very much in an exploratory phase, excitedly pursuing multiple avenues with the help of some eager students, colleagues, and partner sites. Along these lines, we are researching our own (and students’) responses to, and experiences with, technological experimentation, and change, in our courses. This poster will display some resources, ideas, and questions we have developed thus far and show some of the new projects we are currently undertaking.