Independent Colleges of Indiana Instructional Technology Summit

Yesterday I had the privilege of participating in the 7th Annual ICI Instructional Technology Summit which took place at Butler University. In one session, I was one of several faculty from Butler who have been part of a workshop entitled “Transforming Teaching Through Technology.” My presentation (for which I shared the Prezi in an earlier post) was focused on electronic textbooks (or “nextbooks”). I mentioned the interactive Bible textbook I began working on several years ago, which I was pleased to discover looks pretty good on an iPad! I hope that other readers will take a look at it if they have never done so, in connection with our ongoing discussion of electronic, online, open access and open source textbooks.

In another session, my colleague Brad Matthies and I joined Caroline Gilson for a panel, on which we talked about ebooks and the challenges and opportunities they present for faculty and librarians. Then Brad did a presentation of his own about libraries and new technology. You can view his presentation, and see interviews with me and another colleague that he included in the presentation, on his Selected Works site (the latter being a major focus of the presentation).

The keynote address was by Tony Vincent, and it included a lot of thought-provoking material. He showed several YouTube videos which offer tutorials on how to cheat on tests and exams. Here are a couple of examples:

He also showed one that recommended changing all periods in a paper to 14pt to turn your 6-page paper into a 7-page paper!

I was particularly struck by the fact that most of the videos featured old technology – for instance, making an iron-on and putting it on your shirt. And the use of photoshop to modify a Coke bottle label is just a variation on an older trick (also among the YouTube tutorials he showed) of writing on the inside of a water bottle.

Tony then shared a lot of examples of the use of technology to make learning interesting and fun and get students engaged, so that they are less likely to cheat. What’s more, when we ask why students cheat, it seems that “laziness” is unlikely to be the answer, when we consider the amout of effort and creativity needed to cheat in these ways. Personally, I think it is the fear of forgetting combined with the importance of grades that leads even some bright students to resort to cheating, in at least many instances. And given that information is available anywhere at any time via devices that most students have with them constantly, perhaps it is time to recognize that memorization and testing recall are obsolete in many cases, and our focus as educators should instead be on helping students with information literacy, the identification of reliable information. Even though we call this generation “digital natives,” most of them don’t even know that Google search ranking does not indicate reliability.

It was a great conference, and I highly recommend exploring Tony Vincent’s web site, as it contains a lot of useful links and information for those of us seeking to use technology effectively for educational purposes.