The EDC’s STLHE Presentations
Posted on June 20, 2008 by Joe
Filed Under Blogging, Events, Presentations
This year at the Society for Teaching in Learning and Higher Education (STLHE), my colleague Maggie Cusson and I will be presenting three times. I’m writing this in advance so that by the time you read this, I’ll actually be in the midsts of presenting!
Two of those presentations will be hour long sessions in a workshop format: one presentation will focus on the Centre’s use of Blogging and the other will examine our attempts to develop a TA Workshop Presenter’s community. The final presentation is a poster session and will examine the variety of online resources we’ve used in the past year to communicate with Teaching Assistants.
I’m most comfortable with is the The End of Isolation: Establishing a TA Workshop Presenter Community because I developed the group. I was enticed by the idea of such a group following a presentation by the Psychology department’s Chris Motz and Matt Sorley at the EDC’s December teaching event. Their session, entitled If You Build It, Will They Come? The Development of a Faculty Learning Community, was practical in its description of starting and maintaining a teaching community, as well as its benefits. Their presentation came on the heels of a request from a TA Workshop Presenter who indicated that he had never had the opportunity to meet the other presenters or see the overall structure of the program. The result was an attempt to forge a group: we began to meet regularly to discuss our workshops and the larger structure and communicated more regularly via e-mail. The biggest obstacles were time commitments (how much effort everyone was willing to put in), scheduling (when everyone could meet) and our methods of communication (initially we would e-mail following each workshop, which quickly became unmanageable). In the end, though, we managed to double the size of our group in a single year – from 6 to around 12 – and we’re actively recruiting new and talented members to help round out our topics.
Our second presentation, entitled Why We Blog: Adopting a New Communications Strategy for Teaching and Learning Centres, owes its existence to our former Educational Technology Assistant, Valerie Doucette. She was the pioneer who initiated the blog in October 2007 and regularly maintained it with the help of Matthew DiGuiseppe until she left the EDC in April to pursue her MA (Good luck Val!). In addition to developing and organizing the look, feel and content of the blog, Valerie set us up with a strong model to follow. Since her departure, Instructional Technology Coordinator Ryan Kuhne, the remaining ETAs Derek, Margaret and Mehrak and I have assumed blogging duties. The biggest obstacle is the time commitment: not only do we strive to post regularly, it takes time to find a topic, write and edit a post and ensure that it has practical benefits for Carleton’s teaching community. The benefits far outweigh the hurdles, though – the blog is an indispensable tool for sharing information and resources without being forceful, and it creates an open dialogue with our readers (casual surfers and/or our 30+ regular subscribers). Our wide range of contributors ensures a plethora of voices, tones, topics and specialities, which are only some of the reasons why it currently sits (according to Google Analytics) as our 5th most visited webpage.
The third presentation is our poster session entitled Creating New Online Resources: TA support using online resources. This one proved to be quite the challenge: the poster had to be not only pleasing to the eye, but remain functional enough to educate about our various online initiatives. The end result – thanks to Lauren Potvin and Ryan Kuhne – masterfully achieves both criteria. The red and black colour scheme is striking, and the information is well organized and easy to follow. Content wise, the poster details the EDC’s efforts to vary our communication strategy with TAs this year, using a mixture of traditional (e-mail, website) and new media (streaming video, Facebook, blogs). Our efforts appear to have worked very well considering the increase in successful Certificate recipients, as well as a huge spike in attendance number at training workshops.
Look for online versions of all three presentations, as well as a STLHE review, in the coming weeks!
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