(Photo credit: Dave Dunfield)
The very first computer I can remember sitting in front of was in my father’s atmospheric physics research lab. A room cluttered with expensive and probably delicate equipment seems a risky place to bring a five-year-old boy, but my assumption is he needed to check on some experiments and saw the opportunity to introduce me to something he knew would delight me. He sat me in front of an Apple ][+ computer, loaded up a program from a floppy disk, and soon the blocky 40 by 40 pixel “graphics mode” was displaying big blocky arithmetic problems and the tiny speaker was beeping in celebration each time I typed in a correct answer. It was my first step in a lifelong journey through technology and its immense potential to help humans learn, create, explore, empathize, and connect.
Over the years, however, it has become clear that it takes a lot of intentional effort to make technology’s benefits available to everybody. Back in the mid 2000’s my wife, a high school physics teacher at the time, told me how her school district had received a sizable grant to put the latest high-tech smart whiteboards in every classroom. It took some trial and error, but she managed to get hers up and running as an interactive display for her class. The students were surprised and reported that all their other teachers just treated the devices as normal whiteboards. The grant had put the technology in place but included none of the support for showing teachers how to use them… or why it would make a difference for students. Without that scaffolding, all technology is likely to do is get in the way.
The importance of supporting our technology well, even as we explore new possibilities for it, has only become more pronounced in the 2020s, a time when new educational technology breakthroughs seem to be monthly occurrences and every single one is hyped up as the one that will transform technology forever. Students fresh from an entire high school career in hybrid and remote settings now assume that their university experience will be very online, very digital, and very flexible.
When I started here at UP last year, one of my first priorities was to re-establish the Academic Technology Services and Innovation team to make sure that we weren’t just dropping technology tools into the classroom but also providing the training and context to help faculty understand their potential and come up with new ideas for how to use them. We now have a great team that combines technical acumen with a strong understanding of the educational context. We don’t have quite the capacity to do everything we wish we could right off the bat, so the focus early on is on laying the groundwork for our partnership with the Center for Teaching and Learning, as well as establishing channels for communication with the UP community.
This Tech Talk blog once served as such a channel, and we’re excited to bring it back to full active status. Here, Information Services will post content related not just to succeeding with technology in the classroom, but also for working both in the office and remotely. We’ll share tips and tricks, introduce people to the technology that UP has available to make work more effective and accessible, and celebrate innovative uses of technology on the Bluff. I hope you’ll visit us weekly for a quick bit of technology inspiration (and if you’re so inclined, please reply with your reactions and questions). I’m so excited to see what our amazing community here at UP will accomplish in the future!
