We have some enthusiastic faculty doing some very cool things with technology in ther classes on our campus, I am proud to say. We brought a group of them together last week to showcase their work for other faculty in a tech fair. We offered food, prizes, and a fun social atmosphere in a space close to the offices of most faculty on campus. In spite of the many promises I received from folks who said they would come, attendance was disappointing. Some of it is just spring fever, with faculty and students alike goofing off when they should be making work a top priority. I also think some of it is just faculty burnout on new technologies and new teaching methods – they could be doing far more interesting and dynamic things in their classes, but the tried and true, boring as hell traditional lecture method is just easier and safer. What could we do to get faculty motivated to think creatively about teaching and learning, and to really care about how their classes are impacting their student’s lives?

Today I’m sorting through a series of posts Rob sent dealing with the many implementation processes he’s taken on in the past month. We’ve had iTunes U for awhile now and have had minor successes with it so far, including a couple of brave faculty members who have posted interesting content for a language and a sociology of music class. It’s easy enough from the user perspective, I think, but it has been quite a challenge from the admin perspective. For some reason Apple never saw fit to make this easy to adopt, which I see as just plain nuts. Regardless, we are close to a full and proper rollout now with the authentication schemes one would hope to see in place; i.e. we can control access by user, group, class, insitution and world. We have some great stuff going on here at Linfield and it’s time to start bragging about it.