Favorite things from ELI 2008

At the last minute, I signed up to attend Bryan Alexander’s pre-conference workshop. Looking back on my time at ELI this year, I have to say that I couldn’t possibly have gotten off to a better start. Why? It was such fun. We played with different ways to tell stories, and one picture set off an interesting story that took on a life of its own, with people not even assigned to our group jumping in to play.
(And, I heard a great quote about what a story should do: “Make em cry, make em laugh, make em wait.” Wilkie Collins)

Amazing conversations grew out of that session. Brian Lamb made me think about the conflict between inclusive community and “individual excellence.” And I am still thinking about that. Notes for another day…

I knew the session on Fear 2.0 was going to be amazing and it was. The presentations were the more affecting for being powerful digital stories in their own rights. What a blessedly long way we have come from the Death by Power Point model of sessions. Somehow talking about the fact that there are lots of different kinds of fear in the academy made me feel less afraid of my own fears. I wanted to talk to people about “imposter syndrome” but we ran out of time.

I convened a session for my friends from VCU that was really interesting, but not for the obvious reasons. They presented the research their faculty learning community did on technology adoption by students and professors. The results were interesting, particulary the info on HOW people like to learn new technologies, and the fact that less than 60% of students expected to use the internet in the classroom–and fewer than that say they WANT to use it in the classroom! But the really interesting thing to me was the way this FLC worked together to implement this large scale project. Many conversations errupted at this conference about “faculty development” and for the first time I saw a mass of people from POD there saying: hey! there is a literature about this and a professional group rich with knowledge we need, and it is POD.
VCU and Jeff Nugent are really on to something here that has to do with deep learning for faculty, and they learned it from Milt Cox and POD (see Jeff’s discussion of FLC’s on his new blog). I’m now on a personal mission to find ways to mold faculty learning communities at UR.

I am thinking still of that first workshop, though, and how much fun it was, and how, in that relaxed atmosphere I was both able to use new tools and talk about the big ideas, and make new friends, all at the same time. And it was “just a workshop.” Could it be that a little fun and creative play goes a long way in combatting the dreaded fear we were hearing about?