Last week I joined a group of faculty, instructional designers, administrators, librarians and academic technology specialists at the University of North Florida Academic Technology Innovation Symposium. The symposium represents the type of localized exchange of best practices and pedagogical experiments that is vital to university communities, with ideas on display ranging from Google Glass to 3D printing (like the chocolate-holding keychain pictured above.) I was there to talk about extending models of gamification to consider agency and story-telling as key parts of the classroom experience.
Here are a few highlights and ideas shared throughout the day:
- Changing Ideas for building Online Educational Communities. One theme that emerged throughout the day’s conversations was an interest in rethinking online education as community-based. Jennifer Kane and Jason Lee shared their strategies for integrating community-based learning projects in an online course, which can seem counter-intuitive or difficult thanks to the lack of shared location and direct contact. Kane and Lee suggested that building and sharing these experiences can actually make an online course feel more meaningful.
- Emphasis on Personalization in Virtual Spaces. Several faculty are working on ways of making online education (particularly within course management systems, which can feel very institutional and isolating. Carolyne Ali-Kahn revisited the idea of avatars (popularized thanks to experiments with Second Life, but now best understood more broadly as virtual selves) as a gateway to thinking about both the positive and negative consequences of working with alternate virtual selves, something that those watching recent discourse on Twitter and other social media are experiencing already. Georgette Dumont uses the free Screencast-o-matic to share narrated recordings for feedback as another way to refute the idea of online education as a disembodied experience.
- Growing Interest in Visualizations and Data. Jason Lee and Terence Cavanaugh particularly addressed the idea of personal infographics and resumes, and brought tools for building these types of visualizations in the classroom. Among the infographic tools mentioned Piktochart, Vizualize.me, Kinzaa, and Re.vu are all free options for getting started. I was particularly interested to hear that some faculty have been using infographics as a way to visually convey trends and progressions on their CV, which is typically text-dominated and exhausting to read. I’m not sure I’d dive into the visual CV, but it could be an interesting way to supplement tenure documents.
Conferences like this one are a great way to get a sense of academic technology use in your region (for me, it was the perfect introduction to my new home state.) I was particularly happy to see how many educators are experimenting with free tools and software.
