Tag Archives: Halverson talk

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Inspiration from TEDxPeachtree: SIF Symposium

  October 30, 2014 , ,

Its here. Midterms. As the academic calendar continues to progress, midterms allow you the awareness of “further than we were, but not yet where we need to be” in classes and projects. The same mindset has been being applied to SIF as I had my first small group checkin yesterday. Myself, Ryan, Sruthi, Roxanne, and Valerie all met with Brennan to check in on project progress and the overall SIF experience so far. Because I had not not even met some of these SIFs before, (I’ll remind you that I was not at the SIF kick off meeting in August since I was still living in DC at the time) I really enjoyed that we got to spend a large portion of our time together simply sharing in detail who we are, what projects were were assigned to, and providing an overview of the details of each project and its current status. What was most enjoyable about this was, when these SIFs spoke about their roles and objectives, you could see their faces light up with excitement. And when you hear about their projects, it is easy to see why. My SIF colleagues are working on really meaningful projects that utilize technology in innovative ways. Ah ha. Just what we’ve been striving for all along. But that is my honest reflection towards these projects. People are excited about the work they are doing because it simultaneously interesting, challenging, and best of all-creating a useful end product. This same theme was … Continue reading

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Tweaking the SIF

  October 26, 2014

This afternoon I went to a very interesting talk by Rich Halverson of the University of Wisconsin, which raised two major issues, one about the SIF program in general, and the other about one of my SIF projects, the American History Video project. To keep the post to a manageable length, I’ll save the History video project for a later post and take the SIF-wide issue first. Let me preface all this by saying that I am enjoying SIF immensely, and have learned a ton. That said, I think the program as it is being run now has a significant, but fixable, flaw, and Halverson’s talk was just the kind of event that I think could fix it. Rather than a narrow technical training, say how to use a specific piece of software, (as many of the ‘normal’ training opportunities available to us are), this was a talk that was simultaneously practical and actionable, yet mostly concerned with big pictures and with deep and broad questions about the role of technology and innovation in higher ed. My time in the SIF has been quite useful so far, well worth the not inconsiderable investment of time that it has required. However, my experience in general has been that because we (maybe I should say ‘I’) are so deep in the details of specific projects and in acquiring the skills that are required to do them, SIF has been a relatively poor forum for thinking about these big questions. Obviously, SIF is … Continue reading

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“Education, Technology, and Society”

  October 26, 2014 , , , , ,

This week I sat in on the two presentations given by Rich Halverson on : Education, Technology, and Society Speaker Series Center for Instructional Innovation.   Much of his presentation was analyzing how technology does and can influence the way we educate and the way we learn.  Although some of the discussion was giving an overview of various approaches to education currently being used, what I found most interesting was his comment on the way kids and young adults communicate and interact with each other and the world. You no longer call you friend to make plans to meet, go to the public library to do research, or have to meet up in person to play a game- everything can be done remotely. You what information on a research topic for school, google it. You want to know where your friend is to see if they want to have lunch? Just see what they last tweeted or put on facebook, see if they have checked in somewhere or send a quick text.  Want to get with your friends and play the newest video game? Just get online and talk via your game console or computer.  Basic human interaction is not the same , yet the way we approach the classroom and education is shockingly stagnant. I believe in much of the traditional concepts utilized ino our public systems, but that is also in part because I do and have succeeded in them.  I am one of the few people I know … Continue reading