Conference Report on the ELI/EDUCAUSE Annual Meeting,
22-24 January 2007
Omni Hotel-CNN, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Amy L. Fletcher, Ph.D.
Political Science
June 2007
Background
ELI (EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative) is a non-profit professional community that
focuses on the links between technological innovation and enhanced teaching and
learning. The 2007 meeting in Atlanta, Creating a Successful Learning Culture: Connecting
Learners, Communities, and Information, provided deep immersion in the theory and
practice of cutting-edge learning technologies such as:
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Virtual worlds
Massively-multiplayer games
Social networking
User-created content.
The conference also allowed attendees to network and learn via a variety of
presentation formats. In addition to traditional panel presentations, the program
included workshops, Experience IT sessions, innovation demonstrations, poster
presentations, and learning circles.
This conference report focuses on items of particular relevance to the University of
Canterbury.
Highlights
1.
The Horizon Report (2007 Edition)
The most interesting presentation that I participated in was the featured session on the
2007 Horizon Report: Six Technologies to Watch. The Horizon Report is part of an in-depth
foresight exercise, co-produced by the New Media Consortium (NMC) and
EDUCAUSE/ELI, which analyzes emerging technologies in higher education over the
short, medium and long-term.
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This year’s report also identifies six major challenges in the higher education sector:
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New forms of work and assessment made possible by digital technologies do not
fit well within traditional processes of professional development and/or student
evaluation.
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Academic leadership should encourage these new forms of scholarship, research
and creative expression, but has generally been slow to develop new evaluation
criteria for either faculty or staff.
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Intellectual property law and copyright norms continue to affect how scholarly
work is done, and to complicate the provision of high-quality and easily
accessible Web-based content.
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The gap between media tools and media content remains, with the latter lagging
far behind the former in both sophistication and pedagogical utility.
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Collaborative learning also requires new forms of assessment.
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Higher education will likely continue to face increased pressures to respond to
multiple types of student cohorts, with the use of mobile and personal devices
increasing.
The six technologies showcased in the 2007 report are listed below:
Time Horizon: One Year or Less
1.
User-Created Content
2.
Social Networking
Time Horizon: Two – Three Years
3.
Mobile Phones
4.
Virtual Worlds
Time Horizon: Four – Five Years
5.
New Scholarship/Emerging [Digital] Forms of Publication
6.
Massively Multiplayer Educational Games
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Throughout the group presentation on this report, the presenters stressed that the key
question is what are the missing pieces required for this technology to be implemented
effectively in higher education?
Taking Virtual Worlds as one example, several participants noted the widespread
assumption that tools such as the widely used Internet site, Second Life, can and should
enhance learning; however, little empirical evidence exists to support this assumption.
Moreover, the time constraints and professional norms of academia as it currently exists
means that incentives to pursue this sort of research are notably lacking and can, in fact,
damage the career progress of scholars in cases where value is placed on traditional
disciplines, and inter-disciplinary research (particularly with respect to technology) is
subsequently marginalized.
Staying with the Virtual Worlds example, other participants raised important questions
such as:
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Can faculty who’ve resisted IT to this point ‘leap-frog’ certain stages (such as
Blackboard) and succeed with these next generation tools?
If so, what pressure does this put on IT Departments and support services to
work across increasingly different levels of faculty interest, motivation, and
expertise?
What are the ethical implications for faculty, support staff, and students when
well-intentioned experiments with IT fail?
What are the psychological implications of using 3-D immersive technologies
for higher education, and what norms can be developed to handle potential
problems with respect to student identity and authenticity?
As technology grows increasingly sophisticated, these sorts of questions are relevant to
all advanced educational technologies. Moreover, the gap between the savvy student’s
social use of these tools—and the lagging expertise of many faculty members—could
raise serious issues of legitimacy and relevance in the classrooms of the future.
2.
Podcast IT: Preparing Faculty for Academic Podcasting
This was another highly useful session. The University of Tennessee’s “Podsquad”
demonstrated one path to a successful implementation of podcasting in the university
classroom. They emphasized that while learning focuses, rightly, on the student, it is
nonetheless essential for IT staff to ‘put themselves in the mindset’ of faculty, even
where faculty resistance to technology may seem silly and/or self-serving. In
particular, this group argued that it is essential to make the use of podcasts as seamless,
unthreatening and easy as possible, even to the point at the initial stages of providing
information that (to IT staff) might seem obvious, and also to ‘hand holding’ the
lecturer through the first course. (Note: I convened this session).
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3.
Achieving Wider Use of Innovations in Educational Technology: Findings from the
MIT/Microsoft iCampus Study
Stephen C. Ehrmann, VP and Director, The Flashlight Program, The TLT Group and
Phillip D. Long, Senior Strategist for Academic Computing and Director of Learning
Outreach for iCampus, MIT, convened this session.
Questions canvassed here included:
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What barriers inhibit wider adoption and institutionalization of facultydeveloped software?
What strategies should universities, corporations, and foundations use to
overcome these barriers?
The presenters argued that higher education is ‘still trapped in a guild model of
innovation’—a model that business left behind a long time ago because it faced the
realities of ‘creative destruction’ via technology much earlier than the universities.
They also noted that faculty networks and incentive structures remain content and
discipline based, and that it is extremely rare to find a professor that is able and willing
to bridge his/her discipline and the educational innovation community.
Of special interest to Canterbury was the repeated observation that the University of
Queensland has been ‘very aggressive in innovation.’
4.
Hello, Mr. Chips: Toward Robotic Tutors in Higher Education?
I should also note that the UCTL grant enabled me to co-present at a session on my
current work with the Virtual Instructor Pilot Research Group (VIPRG). VIPRG,
sponsored by the IEEE, explores the pedagogical and technical factors involved in the
use of virtual instructors (ranging from 3-D avatars to robots) in the classroom. This
session, co-presented with Daniela Marghitu (Faculty, Auburn University) and Donna
Russell (Faculty, University of Missouri-Kansas City), demonstrated initial findings that
the effective use of virtuality in the classroom depends less on technology and more on
contextual and cultural variables that differ across learning environments and nationstates.
Conclusion
I focused in this report on four major and effective sessions that I think have particular
relevance to the University of Canterbury. However, I am happy to provide additional
information about sessions and resources, should the UCTL find this useful. This was a
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resource rich conference, and I gathered a variety of useful items including ELI Papers
(freely distributed) and pamphlets from the ELI series “7 things you should know about
. . . .” The ELI papers are: 1) An Overview of E-Portfolios; and 2) Ensuring the Net
Generation is Net Savvy. The items from the 7 Things you should know about (series)
include: 1) Augmented Reality; 2) Collaborative Editing, 3) Social Bookmarking; and 4)
Blogs. These and a variety of other resources are freely available from the
EDUCAUSE/ELI resource library at: http://connect.educause.edu/
Finally, I would like to note that I was invited, in May 2007, to present at the first
annual conference of the Virtual Instructors Research Pilot Group at Georgetown
University in Washington, DC. A generous National Science Foundation travel grant
enabled my attendance, and I developed themes and ideas for presentation here that
emerged, in part, from the discussions at ELI in January.
At this second conference, I persuaded the project directors of VIPRG to expand the
research project to include a new subcommittee (that I will likely chair) on the Ethical,
Legal and Social Implications of Virtual Instructors in the Classroom.
I find this a happy outcome, and one facilitated by the UCTL grant and the opportunity
to attend a prestigious and international conference such as ELI. I am pleased to have
been given the opportunity to become more familiar with ELI/EDUCAUSE’s work, to
present my interim work on virtuality/robotics in the classroom, and to extend this
work to further presentation in Washington, DC.
Please accept my sincerest thanks to UCTL for the generous award of a University
Teaching and Learning Conference Grant.
I would highly recommend future ELI conferences to faculty and staff across all
disciplines who are interested in high-quality work on technological innovation and
learning.
Amy Lynn Fletcher
Senior Lecturer
Political Science
Amy.fletcher@canterbury.ac.nz
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