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Volume 10, Number 2: November 30, 2003

UW-Extension Launches a Virtual Community
for Scholars of Teaching and Learning with Technology

by Tammy Kempfert
Editor, Teaching with Technology Today

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University of Wisconsin faculty and staff can now network with their peers in an online community of scholars devoted to teaching and learning with technology. The virtual community, hosted by the UW-Extension, stems from a systemwide initiative to promote faculty inquiry into their own teaching practices and their students' learning. Rooted in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning movement, the initiative has every UW campus focused on finding systematic ways to understand and improve learning.1

With its emphasis on distance learning and classroom technologies, UW-Extension's program got underway earlier this month at a one-day teleconference keynoted by Georgetown University's Randy Bass.2 Enrolled faculty and staff from around the state assembled at five UW campuses to hear Bass and to set personal goals for their own teaching and learning projects.

In his presentation, Bass challenged participants "to not think about teaching and learning only from the teaching side, but to use the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning as a tool to learn how to listen for valid questions." Problems in teaching, Bass said, are seldom viewed as opportunities for exploration. Unlike in traditional research, "where having a 'problem' is at the heart of investigative inquiry," attempting to describe one's teaching problems often becomes a "denigrating" process, he said. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning seeks to inspire teachers, individually and with their colleagues, not only to investigate their teaching problems but also to collect and decipher the data, and to communicate their findings.

For Bass, classroom technologies pose several problems worth pursuing. "How do we use online spaces to teach for understanding?" he asked. He called for further investigation into using technology to use course time and space more effectively, help model expert thinking, and reveal student thinking processes--all of which he believes promote learning.

Project leaders at UW-Extension have created a password-protected site in Desire2Learn, where they will make Randy Bass's keynote available in its entirety to community members. While teleconference participants have already been enrolled in the online community, those not able to attend the event can still register at the project website. In addition to viewing the keynote, community members can join in regular online discussions and find articles, books, and other instructional resources that will increase their understanding of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning with Technology. Those who conduct scholarly inquiry into teaching and learning with technology can post their findings on the website as well. A project listserv will allow participants to further discuss and receive feedback on their individual plans.

Organizers of the event remain hopeful that funding for the initiative will be available for another year. "The bottom line," said UW-Extension Provost Marv Van Kekerix, "is that we want to sponsor more, better learning."

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Notes

1 For more information, visit the UW System Leadership Site for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

2 See Randy Bass's website at http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/.





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