Gettysburg is fairly unique in that a lot of the folks in IT teach a course or two per year. Most of the upper leadership have PhDs or at least a masters in EE with a lot of real world experience, and so we do everything from Shakespeare to Astronomy labs to first year seminars. We recently gave a quick set of talks at a lunch run by our campus center for creative teaching, and it was rather amusing to note how *little* most of actually do.
I've long been a believer in only using tech where it's appropriate, but almost all of the rest of the IT leadership is in the same boat. Our associate VP, our 17th century lit guy, has his students rework a scene in an old play, then act and film it using low end equipment. Rather than build the course around this, he actually goes very slowly, uses it for only one assignment and gets feedback from the students if it's useful. Our senior instructional technologist (population studies) wanted to use full bore GIS in her last class, but ended up backpedaling and trying something much less ambitious when it became obvious that it was not going to be possible. Our VP did go through with using Kindles as textbook readers, but his senior capstone CS course is built around real life experiences in the IT world far more than the technology. The head of computing services is the sort of guy who builds remotely operated radio telescopes, but then claims he doesn't really use tech all that much in his classes...
As for me, in my FYS I use only the most up-to-date technology. When making flint arrowheads, I use pressure flaking to rework hard hammer starters. We use only the most up to date gunpowder recipies, and I even let the students use paper to paint on rather than a rock wall after they finished making earth-pigment-based paints...
No comments:
Post a Comment