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Retrofitting Academe: Adapting Faculty Attitudes and Practices to Technology

1995; 1105 Media; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

0192-592X

LeAne H. Rutherford, Sheryl J. Grana,

Online and Blended Learning

The Chinese character for risk combines under one roof the symbol for uncertainty with the symbol for opportunity. If postsecondary education is to succeed, it will have to take the risks, and overcome the fears and uncertainties caused by change to avail itself of unprecedented opportunities presented by technology. Faculty, often gatekeepers of knowledge, must seize the moment. This means adapting their attitudes and remodeling their practices to retrofit academe. * Changes in the Classroom In many classrooms where emphasis has shifted from teaching to learning, transformations have been occurring that take some adjustment. Learning is becoming more active and less authority-dependent. Pushing lecture to the side, other educational strategies that actively involve students are being recommended and used to enhance student learning: case studies, cooperative learning, debates, peer projects, collaborative endeavors... Technology itself both mandates active learning and assists it. No matter the form, the ultimate goal for these multi-dimensional methods is to create students who can function independently and think critically. Reaching such developmental goals has never been easy. Students may resist these new methods; preferring that faculty give them the right answers. Some faculty may resist because, never having had instruction in how to teach, they teach only as they themselves were taught (which for many means exclusively lecturing). Vacating the stage to becoming a facilitator rather than the font of learning may seem counterproductive and rather bland. Finally, issues of control surface. However, although many faculty have adapted, retrofitted and remodeled their teaching, it is time to do more. * Adjusting Roles, Redefining the Destination Traditionally instructors have been the entrance to information. If not the gate, then surely they were the gatekeepers. They have had control over the terms and facts of the subject matter. They have had control over the input, the throughput and the output. Exit control. Enter technology. Enter access to so many facts and so much data that Solomon couldn't deal wisely with them. Enter the Information Age. Enter changing faculty roles and a burgeoning knowledge base pointing to the need for literacy in an age. Faculty will have to renovate attitudes refurbish frayed pedagogy, and rewire old circuits to accommodate all of these technologically inspired changes. The current definition of critical thinking is being replaced by the larger term, information literacy. Fortunately, literacy and critical thinking have a great deal in common. In Information Literacy in an Information Society: A Concept for the Information Age, Doyle defines an information-literate person as one who can identify a problem, recognize the need for accurate and complete to make decisions, ask questions based on needs, develop search strategies, access and evaluate information, organize and integrate and use it in critical thinking and problem solving.[1] The emphasis is less on knowledge for its own sake and more on process based on utility. So what has changed? The proliferation of sources of information, the speed with which it can be obtained, and its quantity. The revolution started by the printing press was a cow-path compared to the revolution started by electronic advances that have brought us the Info Superhighway. All institutions are currently wrestling with architectural questions of what technology, now much technology, which technology, for whom, and at what cost. Electronics the common denominator. That includes interactive TV; e-mail; Internet; mainframe resources such as Veronica, Lynx, Gopher and X Windows; or micro resources such as the World Wide Web, Microsoft PowerPoint; CD-ROM...an explosion of hardware, software, and even language. …