Matthew Daniel's List: Academic Commons Issue

• Lynne Adrian (University of Alabama) started off investigating the role of personal response systems (“clickers”) in a large enrollment Humanities course to see if the use of concept questions would increase student engagement, but was soon led to reflect much more interestingly on the purpose of questions in class and the very nature of the questions she had been asking for more than twenty years. Similarly, Joe Ugoretz (Borough of Manhattan Community College), in an early inquiry, hoped to study the benefits of a free-form discussion space in an online literature course, but got frustrated because the students would frequently digress and stray off topic; finally it occurred to him that the really interesting inquiry lay in learning more about the nature of digressions themselves, considering which were productive and which were not.

• We  need, in short, to merge a culture of inquiry into teaching and  learning with a culture of experimentation around new media technologies
• Our ability to make the best use of any technologies to improve education  hinges ultimately on the reciprocal capacities to bring our powers of  inquiry to bear on educational technologies, as well as to bring the  power of new technologies to bear on our methods of inquiry and our  representation of knowledge about teaching practice.
• the continuity  of learning issues from Web 1.0 to 2.0 technologies, from online discussion  tools, hypertext and multimedia authoring to emergent forms of electronic  portfolios, blogs, social networking tools, and virtual reality environments.  We take these up in the context of a dual challenge: to understand better  the changing nature of learning in new media environments and the potential  of new media environments to make learning--and faculty insights into teaching--visible and usable.
• Nothing good will come of these technologies  if we do not first confront the crisis of significance and bring relevance  back into education. In some ways these technologies act as magnifiers. If we fail to address the crisis of significance, the technologies will  only magnify the problem by allowing students to tune out more easily  and completely.”
• Cathy  Davidson’s interview about “participatory learning and the new humanities,”  where her celebration of the potential for “Humanities 2.0” is counter  balanced by entrenched reluctance to rethink basic practices in our  fields, especially around the ways we recognize expertise, collaboration,  and creativity.
• guess part of me just  doesn’t understand why this isn’t the most exciting time for all  of us in our profession and why we aren’t figuring out ways that we  can use this to bolster our mission in the world, our methods in the  world, our reach in the world, our understanding of what we do and what  we have to offer our students in the world? It just feels like we’re  in an age where we educators should be the thought leaders and so many  of us are futzing around the edges, and I don’t get it.
• n this environment  it is especially important to flank classroom-based inquiry with  institutional learning, where we can put into practice wide-scale  views of learning outcomes as textured as those of faculty who look  at learning in their own classrooms.

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