Page 52 - Campus Technology, January/February 2019

C-Level View
exploring the purpose of the work they do?
Campbell: There are many examples. The Great VCU
Bike Race Book brought the entire campus together in
an interesting project for teaching and learning — and, as
it happens, for teaching and learning technologies, too. Instead of simply cancelling classes during the week of an international bicycle race whose path would disrupt normal campus traffic patterns, we used the opportunity to create short courses in that space, courses with substantial online components that would present students’ learning and accomplishments during the courses. The day before we launched those one-credit, one-week courses, I
sat in a room and listened to 25 colleagues share with each other the courses they had designed — courses ranging from marketing to gender studies to journalism to physics. That was a space for development and insight! And that space was reflected online in the WordPress-based course site for each of these learning experiences.
Now, there had been a great deal of time and energy devoted to getting us to that moment, including some intensive conceptual and technological designs that
involved trust and a willingness to dwell in some uncomfortable uncertainties and messy planning. But the results were hard to argue with, on both the faculty and student sides. Just about everyone emerged from the experience reinvigorated and inspired. More than one colleague said they’d had their faith in the purpose of higher education restored as a result of that experience. I think that kind of restoration and rejuvenation must have a place in faculty development — a central place — or we risk losing the very core of our shared purpose.
CT: How can you bring a sense of purpose similar to what you experienced in the bike race example, into the majority of faculty development efforts?
Campbell: By not promoting fractured programs! I always told the staff in the Academic Learning Transformation Laboratory (ALT Lab) that my goal was to have every conversation or workshop or program related to pedagogical development include a rich exploration of computers and networks, and vice-versa. All too often, centers supporting teaching and learning fracture into two camps: those supporting pedagogy, and those supporting so-called
academic technology, an area that can range from the campus course management system to lecture capture technology to personal computer replacement cycles.
Over the years, as these “academic technologies” have developed, we appear to have lost the ability to understand technologies as expressions of ideas, principles and values. For that matter, we seem to have lost our ability to understand the structures and business practices of higher education as expressions of ideas, principles and values, too. Faculty have a lot to do, and unfortunately one of the things we do is to accept very mixed or contradictory messages about how we should order our priorities.
Still, at their best, centers for teaching and learning can offer faculty a space to develop more robust areas of insight for their own practice as professors in this digital age. The present digital age is one in which the need to engage with big questions about philosophies of learning and communication is more important than ever. Beyond education, no other sector of society will encourage
that kind of engagement, because to do so doesn’t make sense if the goal is profit or immediate impact. But without that kind of engagement, we risk gaining the world and losing our souls. 4
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | January/February 2019