Submitted by Alex Chapin
Part of the re-organization of LIS was the introduction of “teams.” Teams consist of individuals from different areas within LIS who are brought together to take on a particular project or initiative or area of activity not covered by a single functional area. Last June, LIS introduced three teams, one focused on the LIS website, another on digitization and another on curricular technology.
The Curricular Technology team has been meeting once a week since its formation. The team spent a fair amount of time just figuring out its mission, “to research, evaluate and recommend technologies for teaching and learning” and to come up with some sort of vision, an elevator pitch if you will. Once these were in place we posted them to our blog and have been documenting our work ever since.
Currently, we have a lot of projects we are working on simultaneously. Many of these are focused on gathering information about curricular technology needs at Middlebury. We’ve already began to document what we think we know about technology needs, what we think we need to verify and what we really don’t know. We have also been compiling a “matrix” of features we think are important for technologies that support teaching, learning and research and have been analyzing how technology is currently being used in the curriculum.
What we really need to do now is talk to people, many different people, faculty, staff, students, administrators and find out what the community wants and thinks it needs in the area of educational technology. In doing so, we may need to educate people about what is possible with current technologies and what may be possible with emerging technologies. It is likely we’ll follow the lead of the web redo project. We hope to publish a survey soon that will begin to ask some basic questions. We likely follow up with invitations to join focus groups.
We invite you to visit the Curricular Technology Team blog regularly or put it in your favorite RSS reader and join in on the conversation.