Making Connections Community

Founding Members:

Lisa Dresdner, PhD., Center for Teaching & Learning Director & English Professor

Janie Burkhardt, Professor, ESL 

Lois Aime, Director of Educational Technology & Adjunct Instructor

We are working with our third cohort of faculty this semester (spring, 2010). Our focus right now is to work with faculty teaching in learning communities made up of Freshman Seminar and English 084 which is the developmental English class that precedes ENG 101. But we have also opened this up to faculty teaching in other disciplines and outside learning communities.

We held a three-day professional development workshop in January that took place on the beaches of the Bahamas (in spirit and with the help of a few props) and a follow-up last Friday that focused on the use of ePortfolio in reflective teaching and learning.

The learning community project and some of the ePortfolio project funding are supported by a grant we received that we call the CARI-Grant (we can't help it!).

 In order to address the fact that many of our students are much less technologically adept than they believe they are we have created a one-credit course in Information & Technology literacy that will hopefully teach students how to use academic technology and how to use more general technology in an academic setting. Emaiil addresses and email protocol are one issue we address in this context. Some of the other issues we address include how to format academic papers, how to determine whether websites are giving biased or unbiased or just wrong information, etc. This course is mandatory for students in the learning communities associated with the CARI-Grant.

But, we are taking this all in very small steps........

Lisa, Janie and Lois presented at the NCSPOD Conference in Minneapolis/St Paul last November (2009) on the professional development structure we are using in our work with faculty.