Ode to a Faculty Academy; Or, My Brain is Full

The process of processing Faculty Academy is always difficult. Sifting through the inspiration and ideas of another amazing two days is going to take a while.

Highlights that stick out at this juncture:

-- Barbara Ganley's two presentations -- one an impassioned "call to arms" for the role of slow blogging (writing with reflection and purpose) in 21st-century learning, the other an inspiring yet practical workshop on the way to frame a technology-intensive course around both the content and the individual students in a given class. [The last deserves a blog post of its own, and probably from someone more articulate than me.]

-- Claudia Emerson's online technology coming-out party -- three presentations on three different projects, and each of them about a site/blog/work that I wish my students and I had created.

-- Alan Levine's reminder that play and experimentation with non-obviously educational technologies like Second Life and Twitter can provide us with new ways to address educational questions.

-- The Teaching and Learning Technology Fellows demonstrating that a little money (a course release), a fair amount of talking, and a lot of support can aid both technology evangelists and technophobes in creating thoughtful, creative projects from which our students will benefit. [And that not knowing at first exactly what you want to do can be a really good thing.]

-- Karen Stephenson's talk about networks of social interaction, of knowledge capital, and the resulting twittering and Twittering about who the hubs, mavericks and heretics of Mary Washington are (and whether or not we need to give them a hug). [Lots more to think about here....] [Thanks to Gardner for his role in bringing Barbara, Alan, and Karen to campus.]

-- The success of Martha Burtis and the DTLT ITSs (Jerry, Jim, Andy, and Patrick) in not only putting on a terrific conference (including several of their own sessions), but also providing the moral and technical support that enabled almost every one of the projects we saw presented.


[What? What do you mean you missed it?! Well, there's always next year. Or you can talk to your friendly neighborhood ITS today. They're happy to help you implement your ideas, or even to help you figure out what you might want to do. Don't have an ITS at your school? Ask for one. (But you can't have ours.) Their presence here is one of the best things about UMW.]