Meet Some Members
of Our Learning Community
Renee Meyers Renee Meyers is the coordinator of the UW
System Leadership Site for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
Housed at UW-Milwaukee, the website serves all UW System institutions,
each of which is currently developing an SoTL project. Meyers
says, "From
the Leadership Site, we are working to build a multi-institutional
framework for fostering the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning."
A professor of communication at UW-Milwaukee, Meyers is interested
in group-centered learning, and her SoTL work centers around
that topic. She conducted a recent study in which she examined
her students' communication in discussion groups. To learn more
about the types of evidence students use to support their answers
in discussions, she videotaped their group quiz discussions across
a semester (four groups once a week), coded the evidence that
each student presented, and then analyzed the results. "Although
I found that some students did not present any evidence in these
discussions, the best students presented evidence that was drawn
from the text, notes, teacher or class discussion. Some students
used evidence that they produced themselves such as examples
or experiences that they thought helped explain their quiz answer
choice," she
says. In her study, Meyers found that groups did as well as,
or better than, the best individual in the class on these quizzes
about 70% of the time. "I
think these findings suggest that students are learning through
discussion in their groups, and that use of good evidence is
important to that learning process," she
says.
Why do the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning with Technology?
Because, Meyers says, "to date, we do not know a lot about
how technology affects student learning." If teachers learn
more about the
intersection of technology and student learning through systematic
inquiry, Meyers believes "we can make informed choices about
when and how to use technology in our classrooms. We will no
longer have to rely on our intuition about whether technology
is useful for student learning or not." Further, she says, "Since
this is a fairly new, and undeveloped, area, it is ripe for questioning,
systematic investigation, and analysis. Scholars who are familiar
with the principles of SoTL work are best equipped to do this
important work."
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Marv van Kekerix The overall goal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
with Technology project is to improve teaching and learning for
the diverse groups of clients and learners served by the UW-Extension. So
says the institution's Vice Chancellor, Marv van Kekerix, who
has the responsibility of locating resources to support the SoTLT
initiative, and of providing forums to discuss and implement
it. "It's very important for leadership to indicate that this
work is something they feel is significant," he says. "And
I believe we've done a very good job here of promoting scholarship
in general--and more specifically with the SoTLT effort."
Van Kekerix believes that the technology component of the Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning is particularly important to the UW-Extension
because of the diverse and distributed set of learners who participate
in its programming. "We cannot bring them to one location. They
are going to be spread out, and they are going to have very specific
sets of learning needs," he explains. Technology, he adds, is
a key piece of learning anywhere, but particularly at the UW-Extension,
which typically serves non-traditional adult learners. "In that
context, it's vital that we know how to create communities and
how to interact with them effectively," he says.
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Penny Ralston-Berg
An instructional designer for UW-Learning Innovations, Penny
Ralston-Berg spends much of her workday collaborating with subject
matter experts in the design and development of e-learning resources.
She is especially interested in the Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning with Technology as it benefits learning communities
at large. "Too often we work in isolation and are too busy to
document and share findings. The Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning with Technology helps to break down barriers and encourages
participants to share their knowledge and experience with a global
community," she says. "Evaluation, documentation, and sharing
can lead to improvements on both a local and global scale."
Primarily, Ralston-Berg says her research interests lie "in
the integrated system of support needed to help learners succeed
in the online environment." She would also like to know more
about how learners use the just-in-time (JIT) instructional approach
to choose their own support materials--and ultimately direct
their own learning--to meet specific needs or tasks at hand.
A further interest for Ralston-Berg "concerns provider needs
in relation to online learners and how a provider might most
effectively and efficiently serve a diverse population of online
learners," she says.
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Rosemary Lehman
Rosemary Lehman, a Senior Outreach/Instructional Design Specialist
with Instructional Communications Systems, works in two areas
of research into teaching and learning with technology. "The
first," she explains, "is the development of an instructional
design framework for faculty to convert learning objects (LOs)
to shareable content objects (SCOs) that will be used for a variety
of purposes and technologies (CD-ROM, knowledge repository, and
handheld computers) within and across American Sign Language
(ASL) related disciplines." However, she says that the research-based
framework will be available for learning objects in any content
area and by any educational organization, not just for ASL.
Lehman is also currently researching the emotional component
of "presence" in distance education. "Until recently, presence
has been defined and discussed in terms of behavioral and
cognitive theory. Emotional aspects of presence have been largely
ignored," she says. But Lehman maintains that emotions, as they
interact with behavior and cognition, need to be included in
a theory of presence, and that a more comprehensive understanding
of this interaction "will impact the design, instructional facilitation,
and experience of distance education faculty and learners."
"The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning with Technology is
more than important, it is really critical," Lehman says. "It
encompasses a research-based process that looks at specific teaching
and learning problems--I prefer to call them challenges--that
are evident in the 'real world' we work in; incorporates a time
for review of, and reflection on, the literature, a process that
draws from the best thinking and research and enables looking
at problems or challenges in new ways; includes practical application
for assessment of teaching effectiveness and participant learning;
and culminates in the compilation and sharing of results in a
variety of ways that will continue to add to research and practice.
It is really a cycle that helps us probe beneath the surface
to uncover depth and breadth of understanding."
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Andy Lewis
"My research on the topic of teaching and learning with technology
is really limited to the evaluation of efforts in which I have
used technology to deliver educational programs," says UW-Extension
Professor and Community Development Specialist Andy Lewis. Lewis
has employed both formal and informal methods of research-from
using focus groups and written evaluations with participants
to simply reflecting on the impact of technologies on his students'
learning.
For the Learning Institute for Nonprofit Organizations, Lewis
developed programs for a national audience using live satellite
broadcast and complimentary web-based resources. "While I was
interested in whether or not our instructional design was leading
to effective learning, I was also most interested in whether
or not organizations were applying that new learning to the operations
within their organization. We concluded that we were very effective
in changing practice," he says.
Lewis observed early on that students' initial experiences with
e-learning seem to have a huge impact on how they continue to
perceive it. Those who have suffered through a poorly designed
distance learning experience often avoid it completely in the
future, he says--a phenomenon that he believes does not occur
with site-based programming. "I think therefore that we all have
an obligation to try to improve the quality of our distance learning
options so that people have a favorable impression of the effectiveness
of alternate delivery systems," he adds.
And he believes that the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
with Technology project offers faculty and staff the chance to
build on available research by sharing their experiences. This
is especially important for UW-Extension, he says, where "it
is not enough to simply teach and then measure whether content
was converted to knowledge. Our goal is to transfer knowledge
in a way that impacts people's actions and behaviors." In Lewis'
opinion, ensuring that he makes a difference in people's lives
is worth that time and effort.
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