SUNY CIT2010! Classroom, Continents and Clouds: Who moved my Chalk?
The State University of New York’s Annual Conference on Instructional Technologies (SUNY CIT) was held in at SUNY Plattsburgh this year on May 25th – 28th, 2010.
I have the opportunity to attend many conferences and have been to every CIT since 1995 and it is without reservation that I say that CIT is the best annual conference that I attend each year. In its 19th year, SUNY CIT continues to bring together faculty and instructional support professionals, providing us with an opportunity to share experiences and expertise, discuss common problems, brainstorm solutions, and explore innovative avenues for improving the learning environment with technology.
The highlights for me in addition to the carpool experience with Bill Pelz and Jane Verri and playing poker with the guys : ) follow:
Tuesday, May 24th
The SLN ID RoundTable discussion: an annual opportunity for SLN education and campus-based instructional designers to meet face to face to discuss issues of mutual interest and professional development.
This year we discussed our current research on online student self-regulation (the focus of the spring 2010 student survey) with the ID community. We enlisted the help of the SLN ID community to review and improve the student survey questions on online student self-regulation.We asked the IDs to discuss in small groups what was good, weak, missing, or needed to be reworded in the survey questions. Dr. Peter Shea, SLN senior researcher, led the lively interactive activities and discussions. Following the group feedback on the survey, Peter presented a preliminary summary of the SLN spring 2010 student survey results and some surprising initial findings.
We then asked SLN IDs to review the items of the survey with the aim of recasting the instrument for use with faculty to support online student self-regulation. We asked them to consider the survey, preliminary results, and our discussion, and to discuss in small groups and report to us their suggestions for what we can do to support faculty to foster and support online student self regulation, and how we can amend the Teaching Presence construct to foster online student self regulation. We also asked them to consider the implications for faculty in course revision, course information, and faculty development activities, and to develop item statements that we might provide faculty to self assess on the indicators of student self regulation based on the student survey.
We explored the emerging notion of learning presence, a new construct growing out of our work to further understand and apply the Community of Inquiry model to inform our online instructional design practice and online faculty development approaches. We have identified a gap in the CoI model that can be resolved with this notion of Learning Presence to take into account learner and learning oriented indicators: Online student self-regulation. One of our next steps will be to take the results of this meeting and use them to create a faculty survey self-assessment that we will use to collect data from SLN online faculty as well as a tool to assist us to build awareness among the faculty of what they can do to support their online students’ self regulation.
Wednesday , May 25th
My presentation this year was an hour an a half long hands-on demo entitled Teaching and Learning in the Clouds. I felt like a ‘rockstar’ when i arrived an hour before i was schedule and there were already about 5 people in the room staking out their seats in anticipation of the anticipated crowd for my session and calling themselves my “groupies” : ) I LOVE this presentation and I LOVE talking about taking online instruction outside the confines of the traditional online CMS. There were an estimated 70 people at the presentation and i was told that dozens were turned away at the door for exceeding the room capacity : )
Thursday, May 26th
I attended Welcome to Wikis: learning and Collaborating in Virtual Spaces a hands-on demo by Nathan Grassi and Shaun Hoppel from the University at Buffalo.
They created a wiki for their demo, and i created a wiki during the session in which i practiced the skills being reviewed in the demo.
Welcome to Wikis
I attended several very interesting presentations:
- Collapsing the Chronotope: influencing students’ perception of when and where learning takes place by Linda Ryder from Hudson Valley Community College, and
- Facilitating Chronotopic shifts: teaching polychronic learners in online learning environments by my former online student Stephen Klingaman (SUNY Morrisville), a PhD student in the UAlbany ETAP program. I LOVED these presentations and learning that i am highly polychronic – (it explains a lot) and has very interesting cross-cultural implications for online teaching and learning. (to find out what you are you can take this FB inventory. This is completely unrelated to Steven’s presentation. Just fun to do : )
Of course the main highlights from Thursday were the SUNY chancellor Nancy Zimpher’s address and Malcolm Brown’s (director of the Educause Learining Initiative) Keynote address titled: What’s my paradigm? Learning environments for 21st century learning
Technology and culture are both changing rapidly, at a pace somewhere between evolution and revolution. This is challenging many of higher education’s fundamental assumptions, and nowhere is this challenge more evident than in teaching and learning. But these challenges present opportunities as well. In this session, we will seek to discover what some of those opportunities are, looking especially at the new mobile technologies and the shifting roles of faculty and students. We will examine the concept of learning environments as an overarching framework for the new enterprise of teaching and learning.
Several conference presentations were recorded and are available for on demand viewing including the chancellor’s inspiring address and Malcolm Brown’s keynote.
I also attended the FACT committee Luncheon, the open and closed meetings of the SLN advisory board.
Friday, May 27th
The highlights for me today were that I got a great look at D2L 9 – a vendor presentation, a look inside learning environment 9. It looks like moodle, has a course creator type wizard tool, and looked VERY cool. And i was thrilled to see Joe Fahs’ (Elmira College) presentation on Creating eportfolios for learning with google sites for education. Joe is a member of my PLN and i was happy to hear and see him speak in person.
If you did not have the opportunity to attend CIT this year, I highly recommend that you put it into your calendar for next year. The only thing I wish is that I could have gotten to more sessions and connected with more people. I loved seeing Wayne Jones, Harry Pence, Linda Smith, Jim Greenberg, Ellen Marie Murphy (now from Plymouth State University in New Hampshire) and meeting her new posse, Clark Shah-Nelson, and Pat Masson to name a few, not to mention all the campus-based instructional designers.
CIT 2010 conference program and conference schedule.