The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Making IT Matter

Posted on May 5, 2008 by David Gray

Last month, over a period of two days, UMass professionals with an interest in the implications of technology for teaching and learning gathered for our 2008 Instructional Technology Conference. It would be impossible here to recount all of the tremendous presentations and workshops featured at this event. But perhaps I can summarize it this way: if you think instructional technology in higher education is already amazing, wait until you see what’s on the horizon and coming our way in the not-too-distant future.

But while it is easy to be wowed by the ever-improving technologies that aid online instructional presentations and access, the Web 2.0 world at the same time demands that we study how teaching and learning happen best in the virtual world. For us to achieve a lasting impression as a leading online education provider, we must contribute to the body of scholarship of teaching and learning in this new world of learning. For this reason, and to this objective, more than 140 faculty members and over 130 UMass instructional support staff attended, and participated in, the Conference.

Keynote speaker, Chris Dede, who is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies with the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, captured the spirit of the conference in a 90-minute presentation with riveting real-life examples of how technology is changing how students learn, where and when we learn, effective teaching practices, and what it all means. Again, while I can’t replicate his entire presentation, I can give you a few of his remarks that crystallize his informed vision of the opportunity ahead. Professor Dede said, for example, that students soon beginning their college studies will have multiple jobs and perform professional roles that do not exist today.

Professor Dede noted that in his lifetime, thinking has evolved from a more or less solitary process to a distributed process; that we now live in a world in which educated men and women cannot survive as unitary problem solvers, but as problem finders and collaborators. In fact, based on surveys he cited, communications and collaboration skills are the two top-ranked qualities being sought by 21^st century corporations and leadership organizations.

“Much of what students today do outside of the classroom looks a lot more like work in the real world today than what we give them in the classroom,” he said.

In short, he noted that in a future that features immersive learning, situated learning, mediated learning, and ubiquitous computing/communications, a surreal world emerges that is unlike the real world many of us inhabited while attending college years ago. In our time, receiving predigested information was our predominant educational experience. Today, living and being part of the experience itself is the central driver by which we absorb information and gain knowledge. This means that for those of us who participate in shaping the educational offerings of the here and now as well as for tomorrow, we must unlearn some of what we thought we knew and start re-experiencing the present and reshaping the future.