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Good Technology for the Classroom
University and college professors have the responsibility to not only make knowledge available, but also to connect students with the tools that will facilitate learning. Faculty and staff have a growing number of technologies at their disposal, but they have to understand how to use them to enrich education rather than simply complicating it and making it worse. But there are risks for any institution that wants to experiment with new tools.
Judith Tabron, director of faculty computing services at Hofstra University, describes the challenges of encouraging the most effective uses of information and communication technologies in colleges and universities in a recent commentary (subscription) in The Chronicle of High Education:
All too many tools facilitate less-desirable teaching methods. My IT colleagues often observe that what course-management systems like Blackboard do well is deliver material. Here’s your stuff: Read it, absorb it, review it. What the systems do not do well is facilitate interaction. Here are your peers and teachers: Listen, talk, challenge, answer, try, fail, try again. Both the true liberal-arts curriculum and the online world are examples of revolutions in communication. We have to figure out how to use the latter in service to the former.
Tabron continues by explaining the benefits of allowing faculty to experiment without being judged prematurely by their peers, and of investing technology budgets in long-term academic outcomes, rather than only short-term needs, like equipment repairs.
She also points to the need to invest time and resources into determining new and effective ways to harness technology in the classroom–an avenue that can benefit university education and secondary education alike. Last month, the House authorized funding for a new learning center dedicated to researching and developing innovative digital learning and information technologies for the nation’s education system. And Federation of American Scientists President Henry Kelly explained some of the untapped possibilities for educational technology (including video games) in his recent column for Science Progress.
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