Jon B. and Joe B. recently attended a NITLE workshop hosted at Depauw in southern Indiana for Instructional Technologists at Liberal Arts Colleges. The event was incredibly productive and thought-provoking for the both of us and covered a very broad range of instructional technology topics. This sort of thing is especially useful for us because instructional technology is a young and wide-ranging field. There are not always a lot of people and resources to fall back on, so going to something like this and being able to exchange ideas and practices with 60-70 other instructional technologists was really wonderful.
The session began with a discussion lead by Carol Smith, Associate CIO for Instructional & Learning Services at Depauw. She talked about professional development and advancement for instructional technologists and had us do some break-outs to brainstorm some responses to prompts about various professional topics. It sparked a lot of intense discussion about what direction the rather young field of instructional technology may go and where we as individuals hoped it would go. I came away with it very confident that the future of instructional technology is bright and headed in the right direction. There was a real interest from participants in keeping the emphasis on “instruction” rather than “technology”, which bodes well for the future. Everyone seemed very keen on continuing to find, implement and support things that bring a real value to teaching and learning and not just introducing the latest and greatest tech “toy” to our campus communities. It’s encouraging to see this kind of attitude among our peers in instructional technology.
A wealth of other topics came up in formal presentations and casual conversation over the two day workshop. We came back with ideas on leading workshops, facilitating collaboration, managing student workers, organizing course projects, creating documentation, training users, assessing technology and much, much more. It was a lot to take in such a short time but inspiring and motivating at the same time.
The Wooster community is sure to reap great benefits from the workshop and I know we’ll be posting more here as we go along.
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