Here’s a provocative proposition:

“Most of our discussions around technology … tend to focus on tools (Blackboard, laptops, etc.) rather than getting to the heart of the many ways that technology is changing the world. The implications of these changes are at least as sweeping as anything we’ve seen since Gutenberg, if not Homer. We need to be talking about these kinds of issues as educators.”

If you are interested in joining such a conversation, a small group from the Monterey Institute plans to participate in a national, networked seminar, led by Baylor Professor Gardner Campbell on “Awakening the Digital Imagination.”

• Time: 2-2:45 each Thursday
• Location: Digital Media Commons (Kade second floor)
• Time commitment: 45 minutes per week, plus light reading from The New Media Reader, plus optional podcast and online discussion with colleagues all over the country.

Still interested?  all the details are included in the invitation below.

This opportunity came to our attention through our institutional membership in the New Media Consortium, which is available to us as part of Middlebury.

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Dear colleagues,

Please consider this your invitation to participate in “Awakening the Digital Imagination,” a networked New Media Faculty/Staff Development Seminar for Fall, 2010. If you’d like to investigate the history of ideas about networked computing, rise above the endless churn of gadgets and websites, and read some fantastically visionary essays ranging from video art to interactive computing to comics, this may just be the seminar for you.

The seminar began as an experiment in faculty development at Baylor University in the spring of 2010. A small group of faculty, staff, and graduate students met once a week to discuss an essay in The New Media Reader. Most participants reported deeper engagements with the creative possibilities of new media for teaching and learning, as well as a greater sense of confidence in their own abilities to make sense of the accelerating change surrounding us. You can read one eloquent account of the outcomes here.

For this fall’s networked iteration, individuals or groups will have their own weekly seminars roughly in sync with the Baylor seminar, with blogging and other resource sharing aggregated both locally and in a Netvibes portal. Local seminars meeting on the same day and time will have the possibility for synchronous interaction, but as long as we all stay in sync from week to week with the readings, we’ll have the opportunity for meaningful asynchronous interaction in an online forum. We can also link to each other’s blogs, interact around Delicious/Twitter/Flickr streams, co-create podcasts, etc. The richness and diversity of the networking are up to us to develop and enjoy.

This year, the seminar begins the week of September 8. You can find the syllabus here. A summary of the design and recommendations for the networked seminars is here.

You are also more than welcome to participate individually by doing the weekly readings and contributing to the discussion in our online forum or by adding to our social media streams.

As with last spring, this fall’s seminar is a collaborative effort with the New Media Consortium.

The changes we are living through are highly disruptive, but they bring with them enormous opportunities. Tom Haymes of Houston Community College, one of our networked sites this term, put it very well indeed: “Most of our discussions around technology … tend to focus on tools (Blackboard, laptops, etc.) rather than getting to the heart of the many ways that technology is changing the world. The implications of these changes are at least as sweeping as anything we’ve seen since Gutenberg, if not Homer. We need to be talking about these kinds of issues as educators.”

I hope you can join us in this vital conversation. If this fall doesn’t work for you, keep us in mind for the spring, when we’ll run the seminar again.

Best regards,
Gardner

Dr. Gardner Campbell
Director, Academy for Teaching and Learning
Associate Professor of Literature, Media, and Learning, Honors College
Baylor University
www.gardnercampbell.net <http://www.gardnercampbell.net>

Thanks to Bob Cole, YuFei Wang, Greg Harris and Kristen Byers, who have been adding “how-to” content to the MIIS Knowledge Base. Check it out to refresh your Moodle skills before the semester begins!