Doug Connery e-portfolio

As I am an administrator at a post secondary institute, my posting will be based on general observations of faculty in the programs offered in my department: a School of Business. Many of the faculty are mid to late career Baby Boomers and Gen Xers. As the Baby Boomers retire, new faculty which are Gen X/Y are being hired. These new faculty are gradually shifting the acceptance of digital age learning into a positive light.

Even through I work for a Polytechnic where transforming lives through technology is a core value, many older faculty and surprisingly some new hires, are not embracing technology as much as they could or are encouraged to. My institute is also skills based and it is advised by industry input, thus the need for technology is focused more on competency with industry standard productivity tools rather then social media or alternative presentation tools such as Prezi.

So when we encourage faculty to design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments, many push back and question why they need to change. For example last week I was an observer in a facilitated session with one of our programs where faculty were revising their program teaching philosophy. After developing a philosophy with key works such as technology, interactive and constantly changing, several were surprized to learn that they were going to revise their courses to be close to fully online. The push back was fairly intense as they envisioned re-developing thier courses in a face to face format, even though their courses are currently blended using a learning management system (D2L) and students all have laptops. I suspect these instructors are not using the courses in the LMS and I am not sure what they are telling their students to do with the laptops in class.

For me in ETEC 565, I see an opportunity to learn more about digital age learning so I can help move faculty along the spectrum from entirely face to face towards richly blended and fully on-line. Some of the topics that I would like to focus on are: LMS and other web based approaches, assessment tools, social media and collaborative writing and intellectual property rights/copyright.

I am also experimenting with technology and I am creating this post on the tablet that I received for Christmas. It is a bit clumsy compared to my usual keyboard and desktop computer but appears to be working.