15 years ago, a grassroots group of staff from across the University of Michigan campus joined together as the Teaching and Technology Collaborative (TTC) and introduced Enriching Scholarship. This week of free workshops, discussions, and seminars has become an annual event each May for instructional faculty and staff, and showcases over 120 sessions that address the role that technology plays in fostering engaging and effective teaching, learning, and research.
May 7 Kickoff Event
Buffet Breakfast and Poster Fair
From 9-10 am in the Rackham Assembly Hall, we're hosting a poster fair and buffet breakfast. The poster fair highlights the work of the five recipients of the annual Provost's Teaching Innovation Prize (TIP), as well as CRLT's Investigating Student Learning (ISL) Grant teams. The event provides an opportunity for the campus community to learn more about innovative teaching strategies and to discuss findings from research on teaching and learning. The TIP awards will be presented by Paul Courant before the Keynote Address.
Keynote Address
Education in the Age of Mobilism: The Inevitable Transformation of the K-12 Classroom
The planet is entering headlong into the Age of Mobilism. The hallmark of this new age is connections: connections to people, to events, to places, to things - immediate, multiple, and simultaneous connections. The affordances of a mobile learning device, that miraculously-thin, aluminum-encased slab of glass that is essentially embedded in one's hand, are engendering changes in beliefs, values, and practices in all areas of human endeavor, from accounting to zoological research - and even in K-12!
For the past 40 years or so schools have used computers - desktops to laptops, standalone to online - to "better"implement the existing curriculum - a curriculum that was initially design by the Committee of Ten to prepare students to enter Harvard - in 1892. (It's true - Google it - you will see!) It took the business community 20 years or so to figure out that in order to gain substantive benefit from computing technology one needed to informate, not automate. That is, using the computer to "better" implement an existing business process, i.e., automate, brought only small gains; but when a business process was redefined to take advantage of the affordances of the technology then - and only then - did business see serious, substantial gains. Sadly, K-12 has yet to learn that lesson, generally speaking.
But, we are here to report that some schools have figured out that that mobile learning devices afford students with new opportunities, i.e., informate, to learn and are indeed reaping serious benefits from their use (read: increased test scores).
In my presentation I will (1) describe the characteristics of this Age of Mobilism and I will (2) describe how those mobile devices are the catalyst in the transformation of the classroom from "I Teach," a teacher-centric, didactic, direct instruction, 19th century, boring and ineffective pedagogy to "We Learn," a student-centric, project-based, inquiry-oriented, 21st-century pedagogy.
About the Keynote Speaker
Elliot Soloway is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the College of Engineering, with appointments in the School of Education and School of Information. In 2001 Soloway received the U-M "Golden Apple Award" for the Outstanding Teacher of the Year. sIn 2004 and in 2011, the EECS College of Engineering HKN Honor Society awarded Elliot the "Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award." For more about Soloway's work, take a look at his his blog.You may want to look at past Enriching Scholarships to see the types of classes typically offered during Enriching Scholarship.
In addition to Enriching Scholarship, TTC units offer a variety of sessions throughout the year.