Faculty Development 

--Michael Day, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology 

In the years at Berkeley, I received a generous stipend and develoment funds. I also received a grant from Apple Computer to develop sentence revision software. The technical support there wa outstanding. I believe that my experience helped me secure my current tenure-track job. I don't have nearly the technical support here, but over the years I have gotten recognition, release time, and grant funding for my efforts in the area of teaching with computers and networks. Currently, I am chair of the campus faculty development committee, and we are making a big effort to secure technology training for all interested faculty. (next entry) 

--Diane C. Boehm, Saginaw Valley State University 

Faculty development is one of my responsibilities as Writing Program Director. Our Epiphany team sponsored a Technology Fair in April that offered 20 drop-in sessions and 3 hands-on workshops. It was well received. We plan to expand it next year. We presently are offering 3 summer workshops on creating course webpages. I will offer a workshop on on-line job searching/resumes, as I indicated above ... I learn a lot from my 16-year-old, who is a techie. We also have lots of knowledgeable students who work in our Writing Center, who "develop" my expertise a lot. Our tech staff offer workshops, which I attend. And I ask a lot of questions. Our tech staff work very well with faculty, so there is almost always someone I can find when I need info. And I do a lot of networking with colleagues ... My budget has supported my attendance at ACW this month; last year our VP for Academic Affairs supported 6 of us to attend the Epiphany Institute at VCU. I can usually arrange to attend training I want to have; both my time and my budget are under my management. (next entry) 

--George Otte, Baruch College/CUNY 

Like many writing directors (particularly of my generation--I'm in my mid-forties), I am largely an autodidact in terms of my profession, and my acquaintance with technology is also largely self-taught. Mail-merging and networking led to more interesting applications. I continue to tell people who will listen (I'm on a faculty advisory board for ed tech) that access to computers--especially if that includes access to e-mail and the web--is like instant faculty development. I can't think of any half-day seminar that can give faculty a fraction of the resources that Greg Ritter's CompLink site can, for instance, and that's a click away. 

I do think that incentives need to be a part of the spread of uses and applications from early adopters to general adoption (and consequent institutional transformation); I also think it's vital that rewards structures get put in place for younger faculty looking ahead to tenure and promotion. What people have done without such things in place cannot be used as a rationale that they're not needed. 

I feel especially strongly about this because for the last year I've been running a local listserv for graduate students in English who are interested in using new technologies in education and research. They've given me an especially strong sense of how much being a doctoral student has changed since the day when I *typed* my dissertation, how much the world has changed in the few years the web has been a matter of general/public access--and yet how little the profession has changed, how little institutional structures have changed. (next entry) 

--Judy Williamson, Co-director, Epiphany Associates 

I've been fortunate to have some experiences that led me to some powerful ideas about what not to do in faculty development programs, and despite the pain, there was gain.  Mostly, I learned why it's not a good idea to gear faculty development toward a superficial emphasis on a skills-based approach, a "training" methodology where software skills and "learning outcomes" are pre-defined.  Preoccupation in training with something like "how to do a sig file in Netscape mail" gives less-than-helpful signals to faculty in several ways.  First, it  can encourage wasted resources and duplicated efforts since that sort of general software-level support is usually available through academic computing services or found in online help files.  If teachers are encouraged to seek out academic technology services for learning how to use Netscape or how to do email, and if they are shown how to use help files, they will learn much more than if they are taken lockstep through specific "do this then this" exercises for software mastery. 

Second, software changes so rapidly that teaching software skills alone almost guarantees obsolescence.  Skills will "wear out" and teachers will be frustrated by the old skills not working any longer.  In other word, the promise of "training" turns out to be misleading because it solves few of the complex classroom problems faced by teachers. A focus on pre-defined "learning outcomes" suggests that each learner needs the same material while skill levels and needs are bound to be highly individual in a group of teachers.  Learning to use a new software package needs to be balanced with discussions of pedagogical implications and suggestions for working with students. 

Third, a focus on skills may suggest that mastery of technology is as simple as learning about all the menu items in, say, Netscape.  Faculty need to know that it is simply not possible to be an expert on all things technological, that success with computers means success in learning how to share various levels of expertise.  While knowing all about Netscape may prove helpful, it will not fully support, for example, a teacher's integration of web-based research and publication into the classroom mix. Learning how to use new technologies for teaching can take some teachers time and require not mandates but assurances and encouragement. 

Last, showing teachers software and emphasizing "hands-on" skills does not adequately prepare teachers to understand the depth and breadth of cultural change and the pedagogical options due to computers in the classroom. Looking at what the software "does" could be a way to avoid talking about how the dynamics of the classroom change with the use of networks, how power relationships are transformed, how many new wonderful things are possible, but also frightening because they are so radically different.  Of course, some software lends itself to robust discussions about complexities and challenges in the computer classroom, but this can be lost if the software is approached as just a "skill" to be mastered. One might learn how some software package operates without having a clue about implications for its use. 

Rather than a software skills workshop, I would suggest a blend of tinkering and conversation in which teachers develop approaches for learning how to learn about new technologies.  As Seymour Papert points out in _The Connected Family_  the best learning of new languages leads to fluency, and teachers need to develop computer fluency so they will begin to think about ways to apply their learning to a variety of situations with computers.  They need to talk with each other and find out who has expertise in which areas so they can begin to build up trust in collaboration.  Teachers should have forums for thinking through the challenges of what they value in their traditional classroom and what they hope for with computers.  They need to learn how to make connections outside their department and begin to make connections with larger communities of learners where there are more resources.  Dumbing down the complexities of using computers for teaching through a process of over-simplification will not help build the culture of support teachers need for taking the risks and making the changes they need to make when using computers for teaching and learning. 

Teaching faculty about software skills without building community and developing dialogues about rich possibilities is to short circuit a learning process that needs to happen on emotional, social and intellectual levels.  When we preceive the stakes are high, we all need some humor and joy and patience  to balance out the fears, resistances and blind spots we bring with us to new learning situations.  Sometimes what we need more than answers is a forum for questions and what we appreciate more than a talk is a listen.  Finally, we all need to remember that there are many paths and many practices, no one right way to teach or learn with computers.