[Portfolio] Reminder > New Teaching and Learning Call
Josh Baron
Josh.Baron at marist.edu
Wed Aug 26 09:00:34 PDT 2009
Folks,
Apologies for not posting this earlier today.
As per my list posting from last week, we are postponing our regular
Wednesday T&L call for a couple of weeks while we work to re-focus the
call agenda and reschedule the day/time. Given the low level of list
traffic last week, I'm assuming that everyone is fairly focused on the
start of school so my plan is to work on rescheduling the day/time
starting sometime next week or the following week.
For those who may have missed it, below is the posting I distributed last
week with details on my thoughts for a new focus to the call. Comments
and list discussion is encouraged if you have the time.
Good luck with the start of school!
Josh
===================================
Sakai Colleagues,
In lieu of our usual weekly "teaching and learning" conference call, I
would like to share some thoughts the future of these calls and some new
ideas that have surface following the 10th International Sakai Conference
in Boston this past July. I recognize that this e-mail is very long and
detailed but I felt that in order to engage a larger and broad audience
that a posting to multiple lists, rather than phone calls, was best.
I know that this is a busy time of the year for many of us but if you can
dedicate a few minutes to reviewing this and posting comments that would
be great. To assist in freeing up some of your time, I'm suggesting below
that we not have our regular call for the next several weeks and then
reschedule it for a new day/time.
As many of you are aware, there were several sessions at the Boston
conference focused on the need to find new ways for our community to
discuss, identify and document the types of instructional practices that
Sakai needs to support now and into the near as well as distant future.
Some of this "need" centers around finding new models for the type of
"requirements gathering" that has been attempted in the past. Beyond
this, there also seems to be a strong desire to implement new processes
that would produce "tool/technology agnostic" visions of the types of
instructional practices (ranging from traditional to innovative) that
future versions of Sakai should facilitate and support.
Following the conference there have been a number of discussions taking
place in various groups and settings, including several members of the
newly formed Product Council, as to how we might engage in this new work.
Some of the ideas (but not all) and commentary on this can be found in
Confluence at http://tinyurl.com/nuzsu2. In addition, the folks within
the Portfolio group have shared some of the "visioning" work that they
have been engaged in for some time that many feel could represent a good
model for the larger community (likely requiring some small modification).
Examples of their work can be found at http://tinyurl.com/mx5uvb. I have
participated in some of the weekly Portfolio/OSP calls recently and
believe that they are interested in engaging in some broader work in this
area.
WHERE IS THIS ALL GOING?
I, and I believe others, feel that in order to move forward with some
practical work in this area that we need to establish a regular (I think
weekly but that is open to debate) conference call that is dedicated to
such an effort. At the same time, we need to broaden the participation
beyond the folks who have been regularly participating in the Teaching and
Learning calls as means to increase the resources (i.e. people time) going
into this work and to have a more diverse set of institutions represented
(particularly more international schools).
Because of these issues, I would like to make two proposals:
(1) Re-purpose the Sakai T&L call to focus on "instructional visioning"
activities. This would mean shifting our calls away from the Teaching
with Sakai Innovation Award program and other conference-related
discussions. I am currently talking with Michael Korcuska about how the
Foundation could assist with the TWSIA work (with continued involved of
folks from this group) and also believe that we could move the other
conference-related discussions to the Conference Planning Committee calls.
(2) Reschedule the call during a time that will allow a more diverse and
larger group to participate. This may end up requiring some creative
approaches in order to include various time zones.
NEXT STEPS
I would like to hear from folks "on list" as to any concerns, thoughts,
suggestions, etc. related to these issues and proposed changes. I would
like to particularly encourage folks who are new to either the community
or these calls to share their thoughts. Having this discussion on list
rather than on our calls will allow for greater participation (I hope).
I would also like to suggest that we temporarily postpone the regular
Wednesday at 11:30 AM EDT "Teaching and Learning" call with the plan of
re-starting these calls in mid- to late-September. This will allow us to
some time to find a new day/time as well as free of some time for all of
us to think about and start to discuss (on list) the details of how we
might proceed with practical work. Unless there is objection to this, I
will put out some e-mails over the next couple of weeks in an effort to
find a good time(s) for out future calls.
Finally, I am going to put some time and effort into updating the Teaching
and Learning Confluence page to clean up the older content (I won't remove
it obviously, just re-organize it) and try and set up some pages that will
hopefully facilitate some of our initial work in this area.
I'm looking forward to engaging more on these issues on list with
everyone.
Thanks, Josh
-----------------------------
Joshua Baron
Director, Academic Technology and eLearning
Marist College
Poughkeepsie, New York 12601
(845) 575-3623 (work)
Twitter: JoshBaron
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