Developing a Faculty Consultation Model

There are lots of instructional design models that are employed by various instructional designer, instructional technologist, and instructors. It is a pretty universal thing to teach in graduate school. But has anyone put together a model , or at least best practices for consulting with faculty by instructional support professionals? (I will need to do a little research. Perhaps PODNetwork is a good starting point.) If there is such a model I wonder how closely what I do fits with the model.

My work with faculty requires two things trust and expertise.

Trust is first as teaching is a very personal endeavor.

Expertise is second because trust will be broken quite quickly if:

• I prove to be less than competent in my knowledge of instruction(al technology).
• I don’t demonstrate an appreciation of the faculty member’s expertise especially as without the expertise in the discipline what content is there to be learned?

So that is my philosophy but what are the steps of a consultation?

Pre-consultation

• Be available – being physically available to faculty is the first step. If the faculty member does not see the instructional technologist, (s)he is not likely to ask for assistance.
• Take a personal interest in faculty subject and teaching – it is an instructional technologist’s job to help faculty accomplish their course goals. To be successful it is imperative to understand where opportunities for assisting lie.
• Develop skills and understanding of emerging technology – staying current with instructional technology expands expertise which can easily translate in to more opportunities to assist faculty.

Consultation

• Personalize – We are talking about education so there is no cook book to follow. It is important to know that each problem is unique and efforts should be take to avoid fitting a round peg in a square hole.
• Share possibilities - Both parties need to share. The faculty must share such things as teaching, problem, goals, and style. The instructional technologist must share his understanding of the faculty’s situation, possible solutions, and commitment required.
• Action plan – Identify concrete steps of innovation – Important to note that while the project might not be considered cutting edge or noteworthy by others, it is a change and new practice for the faculty member. The project should be treated with the appropriate amount of care and encouragement. – and responsible party. It is important to divide the work evenly based on expertise.

Implementation

• Develop options – This phase is where the faculty make/revise instruction to include the technology and where the instructional technologist develops the tools and processes for use.
• Incorporation – The faculty uses the technology for teaching. Questions, troubles, and new insights flow from the first uses.
• Develop Confidence and Support faculty – This step is key to continued use. The tasks of this phase vary depending on what the faculty member finds during initial uses. How well problems are addressed and solved and the rate at which the faculty member feels ‘I can do this’ will be key in determining whether or not the innovation will be incorporated into subsequent courses. (Of course there is the caveat that the innovation has to further teaching and learning of the content).
• Evaluate – It is important not to close the books on a project without at the very least a quick check-in with the faculty. It is obviously preferable to have a focused conversation with faculty about the project and the parts that needs improvement.

Now this is not science but these steps have produced many interesting projects.

I would be interested to read about how those of you reading this approach your consultations. I am going to tag this and future posts about faculty consultation models fcmodels and invite you to do the same so that we can tie our posts on this topic together.

Unfortunate

Saddened today when I read Casting Out Nines / The purging of a sorority.  As someone who had a very positive greek experience, I wish I could rebut Robert’s position on the Greek community.

Unfortunately, most organizations are so far from the original ideals of the founding friends that I can not think of any counter points that do not ring hallow.

Sadder yet is the last time I was at my alma matter, I intentionally avoided the guys I saw wearing my letters so that I would not know if they slipped into the letter wearing stereo type.  Ignorance is bliss?

POWERFUL Statement about Instructional Technology! at EduTechie.com

Ever get caught in a debate about the value of technology in education?  This post reminds me of arguments/examples on both sides of divide.

POWERFUL Statement about Instructional Technology! at EduTechie.com

The post itself is worth a read but jeff’s reply to a commenter is worth a repeat.

I think the key is using technology to augment those human relationships, not replace them. I think the scenarioâ??s you describe here are great examples of that. IM and the phone let you stay connected while people are at work. Blogging keeps you connected when you canâ??t be together.

This fits with what I wrote about the technologies I use.

Spent a lot of the day thinking

Today, my son slept a lot recovering from his two month booster shots. (It can also be said that he had two modes of operations today crying and sleeping.)

In the quiet moments, (and my daughter allowed there to be several quiet moments) I got to thinking, which means I got the itch to do some blogging. For a while my thoughts focused on how the technology that I use has built one on another with a common strand of connecting people and ideas. Generally, such technologies have fairly low thresholds for adoption and tend to have minimal hardware requirements, not to mention have greater potential to keep the faculty and learner at the center of education not the technology.

The thoughts of where I am now with regards for technology are pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum than when I took my first computers in education course back in the early 1990’s in Thompson Hall learning Hypercard. Now don’t get me wrong. I saw the value of incorporating technology and even comprehended the paradigm shift that well integrated technology could start/support(at least on the surface). But I could not figure out how a classroom teacher had time to develop computer based simulations for a classroom of 28′ish’ with a handful of computers at best AND still accomplish the other duties of teaching.

What changed between then and now? The web. With creation of the world wide web, a new door opened that allowed the common human (at least those of us in developed countries) easy access information, interactions, and simulations. The web also provided a media where with a minimal amount of expertise one could enter as producer of content.
With the development of blogging software and other applications of the read write web the threshold for adoption is even lower. Web 2.0, whether an appropriate title or not, brings the threshold down to anyone with a desire and a device that will connect to the web.

Now this does not mean that I blindly promote blogs, wikis, and the like? No, as there are many other technologies – multimedia narratives, flash animations/simulations, learning management systems, personal response devises, digital presentations (powerpoint) – that fill a role within educational technology but most if not all require a time commitment for training, learning, and /or development. (And time is a scarce commodity in everyone’s lives especially for classroom instructors.) But the easy of adoption make tools of the read write web very attractive for courses that promote thinking, communication and writing skills.

Where will I go with instructional technology? It is hard to say, but after reviewing this year’s Horizon Report from NMC and ELI, I think I am traveling a similar path with others in educational technology. In addition to my investigation/adoption of various read write web tools, podcasting/personal broadcasting, personal portable computing devices (pda/cell phones), virtual worlds, and educational gaming have captured my curiosity.

What Technology Could I Not Live Without?

Yesterday, I found Fredonia’s first podcast, Paperless University Myth or Reality the discussion started off asking the panelist, “what technology could you not live without?”

This got me thinking.

While it would be a close call between my blog, rss, or my bloglines, I think I would choose bloglines. Through my bloglines account I follow about 125 sites give or take 10. I regularly roll through my subscriptions weeding out sites that aren’t providing relevant information and adding new ones that have caught my eye. It is through this service that I learn what others interested in educational technology are thinking, doing, and plotting. It is through bloglines that I also get my daily dose of news, sports, and dilbert. The wealth of knowledge and thinking inspired by the posts delivered to me as they happen is awesome.

Well on the other hand bloglines is only the tool that delivers information to me, it is my blog where I work through the ideas to form a new understanding. The public nature of a blog forces me to take a position. The social nature of a blog allows others to challenge my position. This in turn forces rethinking and clarification. Perhaps, I should chose my blog as the tech I can’t live without.

But, it is RSS working behind the scenes that delivers content to my bloglines and my blog content to the aggregators of others.

Well then I reject the question. There is not one technology that I can live without. It is a combination of several.

Sakai Video Report: Sakai Overview

My co-worker brought the Sakai Video Report: Sakai Overview to my attention late last week.  I will need to share with the LMS group.  It is only 11 minutes long and worth the time if you support LMS.

A few points to listen for:

• development cycle – releases set and coordinated by foundation upgrades, patches, new features contributed by community
• role of foundation – to coordinate community not drive development
• scalability of  implementation – framework built for large implementations yet scales down for small group collaboration/pilot/implementation
• import/export of content – standards based easy in/easy out content is granular and provides IT organizations exit strategies
• collaborative framework -  thus can be used for coursework, research, institutional projects basically any collaborative project.

Sakai seems to fit within my developing beliefs of providing open learning environments that can be ‘closed’ as appropriate to provide ’safe learning environments’.

I watched the video after reading a Running with Scissors post listening to the first 15 minutes or so of  the ELI 2007 presentation from Jerry Slezak and Jim Groom, Notes Toward an Open (Source) University.

An inevitable dilemma for bloggers?

I was reading Geeky Mom today where she writes about the tension of integrity of person and online personae. She is not the first blogger that struggled with it. Most likely she won’t be the last. I have similar thoughts from time to time and often worry about encouraging faculty to incorporating such a public platform into their classes.

Perhaps these are just growing pains of a changing paradigm of publishing and personal, professional, political expression. And that the tension that many of us are struggling with (partially) come(s) from the possible judgements one could make about each of us based on one post as opposed to considering the collective work.

What is the proverb about first impressions?

Personally, I hope Geeky Mom finds a position of comfort where she can continue to blog from. Her insights and humor are a pleasure to follow.

Facebook – faculty/staff not welcome?

Well, there is a lot of talk/examples about how students are using Facebook as a regular part of college life. And there have been brave soles working on college campuses that are attempting to join the student community through facebook profiles to provide services. This act seems to be met with mixed reviews. Often such attempts are viewed favorably by the service provider and poorly by the students.

This makes me wonder how (if at all) to take advantage of the social networking tools to help the students.

But wWhat is the balance between engaging in this space and not invoke undesired push-back from the students when they realize that we are infringing on their turf?

One idea is to make it easy for them to bring resources from our websites into their online life by using Share in Facebook Links. This is a new feature of Allegheny’s daily news site. It works nicely, at least from my point of view.

I also wonder if advertising events using the flyer system is another possibility. Currently, there are two of these for the Allegheny Community. And they only cost $5 per day.

Where could one find out how these experiments are being received?

Will students accept ‘us’ in facebook to provide information as long as we don’t expect to interact in there or pretend to be overly hip to their jive?

compos(t)ing » The Privacy Myth?

I was reading this post (compos(t)ing » The Privacy Myth?) and its comments and got to thinking.

Last year, I would have agreed with Libby that all of this social networking is not as pervasive as it is reported.

But,when I hired a first year work-study my opinion changed. His life is through IM and Facebook. Google and Wikipedia are the gateways to information. And his attitude about technology is one of expectation. He expects to be connect to friends, information, and the social scene. Ya, this workstudy might be one of the few but I don’t think so. Instead I think he and his peers are the first wave of students where technology is life not tools for life. (I would not say that this makes the generation any more savvy in assessing the information as true and reliable which is a little scary and an opportunity for the education system.)

While the tip of the iceberg are filling the seats of our introductory level courses, it will not belong before the rest of the generation and the next generation will be our students with their own set of expectations of technology, interactions and how to learn.

For example.. Without prompting on my part, really. I just thought it would be cool to check out noggin.com one day as we were watching the upside down show or something. Since then my three year old daughter prefers the interactions of ‘TV’ on the computer (like noggin, sprout, or nick jr) where she can pause, rewind, and alter her experience to regular TV. She likes sending and receiving e-postcards, making shmash ups, and coloring on the computer as she can easily send them to her small network of friends. I am amazed at what is out there for preschoolers and how much more participatory and creative it is now compared to even 5 years ago when my niece started using a computer.

While privacy however we define it is topic for consideration, caution, and concern, I wonder if as educators we need to start to consider how to put students at the center of learning so they will not need to unlearn how they have learned to learn.

I hope that this is not too much of a tangent from the original post. Blogging is a cool technology as it allows for related ideas to be shared directly to a post, using commenting, or by linking to posts using trackbacks to comment externally or take the starting idea in a slightly tangential direction.
We live in an exciting time.

Thinking about Spring/Summer Workshops

It is february and normally two weeks from now I freak out cause I didn’t think about workshops yet. So I am ahead of the ball. Procrastinator no longer(Ha!).

Two definites -

• Emerging Technologies and the Liberal Arts Campus (May 16, 2007)
• Social Software in Education, Introduction to Collaborative Writing (May 17, 2007)

These are already online and being promoted.

Other ideas for workshops, lunches and discussion groups. (Person listed in () is not committed or even contacted yet.) [format possibilities]

• Teaching in a wireless classroom (David S) [lunch]
• Clickers (Susan F/Alice D/David B) [lunch, hands on]
• Digital Imagines and Collections (Alla) [discussion group, hands on]
• Google Earth (Chris) [lunch, hands on]
• LMS (James F/Susan) [hands on]
• Multimedia Development (Alla) [hands on lunch]
• Social Software Awareness [Lunch]
• Horizon Report Awareness [Lunch]

Things yet to be done

• Look at dates
• Check interest
• Consider project support/training
• brainstorm with group