Leaders of instructional technology units from eight other universities joined CIDDE staff at Pitt on October 4-5 for the biannual meeting of the Learning Technology Consortium. Participants celebrated the tenth anniversary of the group, which held its first meeting at Pitt in April of 1998. At this year’s meeting, representatives from each school reported on institutional goals, priorities, and challenges in providing support for faculty as they incorporate technology into their teaching. Diane Davis, CIDDE director and moderator for the meetings, described the meeting as “one of our finest opportunities for close, interpersonal collaboration with colleagues who are leaders in the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning at the university level.”
In addition to the University of Pittsburgh, consortium members include Virginia Tech, Wake Forest University, and the Universities of Delaware, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina Chapel Hill, Maryland, and Notre Dame. Attendees from these institutions were welcomed to Pitt by Vice Provost Robert Pack who was instrumental in establishing the consortium. Members now meet twice each year. According to Davis, rotating the meetings among the nine campuses “enables members to see a wider variety of learning space designs and hear directly from local faculty about their use of new technologies.”.
At this meeting, discussion focused on new technologies and how faculty at the various universities are using them to enhance teaching and learning. Members compared notes, for example, on faculty use of wikis, progress in the development of open source software, new classroom design ideas, and new technologies that show promise for asynchronous learning.
A highlight of the meeting was a presentation from Chris Schunn on SWoRD, the reciprocal peer review system he has designed. Schunn described how the system works and reviewed results of related research on peer-review of writing. Schunn, associate professor of psychology and LRDC research scientist, designed SWoRD to facilitate the use of writing as an instructional tool, especially in large classes where instructor review and feedback are impractical. For additional information on SWoRD, see
http://www.lrdc.pitt.edu/schunn/sword/about.html.
Vice Provost Andrew Blair regularly represents Pitt at consortium meetings, along with senior staff from CIDDE. Blair indicated that, for him, “a highlight was observing the very collegial interactions among the participants. From the beginning, the degree of useful information sharing has been a feature of these biannual meetings, but this was even more evident at this fall’s gathering at Pittsburgh.”
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