Avoiding the Conference Information “Black Hole”

The annual Conference for Online Learning and Teaching with Technology (COLTT) was another resounding success. The vast majority of sessions provided food for thought and ideas for implementing locally. This is almost always the case at conferences: you come away totally jazzed with fresh ideas and new perspectives after attending sessions and talking shop with colleagues. But upon returning to work the reality of the workday sets in and POOF!: all of the great takeaways and fantastic ideas are washed away amid the flood of emails, phone calls, reports, and daily stuff.

Well, not this year. This year, I’m doing something different. This year my conference to-do list is being made public. There are too many great ideas to let get sucked up into this conference information black hole for worthwhile projects.

So here are three project ideas being made public for the sake of accountability to be implemented this fall:

The Faculty Innovation Podcast

This is an idea that began taking shape since the first day of COLTT. David Lyons, University of Colorado at Denver, presented a session on social media tools for classroom use. His use of social media provided the idea for creation of a podcast for discussion of learning technologies and associated ideas and issues. The next day I lunched with Sally Cordrey and Tim Noteboom where I mentioned the podcast idea. We began discussing possible names when Tim comes up with idea for hosting the podcast at the Faculty Innovation Center. This serves the dual purpose of providing faculty perspectives on learning technologies while marketing the greatly underused Faculty Innovation Center, located in Carroll Hall Room 20. Look for the first podcast (or vodcast) episode in early September.

Guest Speakers for Technology Committee Meetings

There are two technology committees on campus. The Academic Technology Committee is charged with examining, promoting, and recommending academic technologies to the university. ATC reports to the Executive Technology Committee. The Educational Technology Committee is for RHCHP and answers to the Academic Dean. Both committees advocate for faculty for improving teaching and learning with technology. To provide new perspectives, guest speakers will be brought in to committee meetings, either in-person or via video conferencing. Speakers will come from regional institutions such as those presenting at COLTT. Every session I attended concluded with the presenter volunteering their email and voice number for more information. Hopefully we can mine this rich knowledge resource for guest speakers. Look for committee guest speakers to begin in October.

Improving Course Content

The third idea will be announced a bit later as Jill Giacomini works out the details. However, expect to see within the next few weeks an outline for a really awesome method to improve online course content.