I'm Mark Fisher. I'm in the department of Philosophy, where I serve as
the director for teaching and learning with technology and philosophy.
The project that I'm working on is an attempt to adapt and
modify the existing teaching with technology certificate,
in order to, on the one hand, make it more
attractive to graduate students in the philosophy department and
on the other hand, make it more directly
suited to the particular kinds of skills and abilities that we're looking for
and looking to help graduate students develop in the philosophy department.
"So can you give an example of some of those skills?"
Well, since it's teaching with technology,
we're concentrating primarily on
integrating a recognition of the importance of
digital tools for
both learning and practicing teaching.
So for instance, we
would like our students to be cognizant of the fact that
the blackboard or the whiteboard is just
as much technology as powerpoint or
prezi or some other kind of format, and that
it's really about making decisions about which existing technologies
are best suited to delivering content or to engaging
students or interacting with students in the way that's most appropriate for the
course objectives. So we think
it would be good for students
to, especially as they're learning to teach and as they're being mentored by senior
faculty, to experiment with things like
presenting in powerpoint or presenting
similar material in prezi and seeing
what differences those
present. We also think
that especially
one of the things that we want to focus on is not just
the first level of teaching using
technology, but the second level of reflecting on their own use
of technology, and of encouraging
their students to develop the same kinds of capacities with technology
for use in their schoolwork and their
research, term papers, outside projects, etc.
that they themselves are developing, so that they are
helping their students to develop the same kind of digital
literacies that they're developing with respect to
working broadly speaking in philosophy. "Yeah, that
reflections piece is often forgot. But it's a key part of
any kind of learning you're involved in.
That's good to hear. And a lot of people
especially in the tech space - I know I did this when I first
started in the spaces - the technology came before your objective or your
pedagogy. And then over time, you realized that that's backwards
and you should start - like you mentioned, what are your objectives that you're trying to get across?
Then let's figure out what that technology matches."
Right, and presumably, newer graduate students
are going to have different levels of familiarity, different levels of
comfort with various
technologies that we confronted first as things that present themselves
as new technologies
whereas they are much more likely to already be involved in social
media to already being
or producing multimedia and sharing it with friends, and so
in a lot of cases, I think, for as
the program continues, the students who come in are going to be
more and more in a position just to be thinking about
and to have some of these skills sort of in the background as they're thinking about their
pedagogy, and the pedagogy can come first and they can recognize that there
are things that they're already doing that can help them
more effectively reach their students and connect with their students, because of course
students themselves are moving in these directions
as well, though not always
it seems, in the same kinds of ways that we might
anticipate reflectively. When we're using technologies that we
came at originally from a standpoint of questions about how to use them in our
research or our teaching.
It's interesting. "My colleague
in IST - and IST is a place they spent early on, looking at
privacy on the internet and all these other kinds of things.
And this guy's an IST Ph.D student - he graduated, and his motto
was Privacy's Dead. He said
we think about it, but the students coming up now and the students coming up in the future -
as long as whatever data they have out there that is being
used in a helpful way, think Amazon, think
places like that, not even a thought is given to that, the privacy
angle of these kinds of things." We had a workshop
with someone who was working with
someone from the Harvard
Graduate School who was working on -
Kerry James - who was working on
new media and student use, and we discussed
privacy fairly extensively, and it seemed like
it's an open question whether privacy is dead
or whether the reigning assumptions have changed so much that
it doesn't match up with what we're used to thinking of
but that there are still implicit presuppositions - maybe no necessarily
about open vs. closed or
completely shut down vs. completely
open, but levels of control or those sorts of
things, so clearly privacy is, in many ways, a socially
situated phenomenon or concept
that changes as people's expectations
and understandings change. But that itself actually presents some pretty
interesting philosophical questions. "There certainly seems to be some
generational differences on how
it's being thought about. It happens like that. And I guess
this somewhat ties in to an aspect of your project - the domain of one's
own, where students will be having their own space, their own
kind of web server that they can do with what they want,
that they can take with them after they leave here.
What's kind of the goal with that aspect of the project?" Well, the basic idea
there is that we want graduate students to
recognize the significance of generating and curating
their own professional portfolio.
And recognizing that - that the internet plays an important role
in people's initial
sort of queries about who you are and what you've been up to
and if people get your application for a job and
they glance at your CB and they Google you, which they're most likely
going to do, it's a pretty good idea to have not only
something that you've put out there come up, but also something
that you've put out there carefully, and something that's expressive of
who you are, but
also sort of representative of an awareness of the need to
present oneself professionally in the
broader sphere of the internet.
Another nice aspect -
so the one side is recognizing
that this is a feature of the way things work and being
somewhat forward-thinking and
active in controlling and
situating oneself. The other
or another aspect is the recognition that
a person's web presence is something that
is going to be sort of a continuous presence over time, and that
contains a kind of a narrative concerning their development
and that while it's very nice
for institutions like Penn State and other places to
provide web posting for them while they're students,
the limitation of that to the time that they're
affiliated with the university brings with it some
issues that we think will affect how
robustly they'll engage in the project from the start
if they know that they're going to lose this or that they'll have to transfer everything when they
graduate, then we suspect that the chances are less likely
to put a lot of care and attention into developing it on the front
end. With the domain of one's own, Penn State picks up the bill
while they're here, but then it's their domain
and so they can choose to continue with that
domain afterwards. It's again
connected to the sense that
another aspect of it, I could say,
is really that aspect of
developing yourself and your professional presence is
something that one has to do both in concert with
but also relatively independently of the institution that they happen to be
developing, that they happen to be affiliated with at any given time.
While it may be good for
a student to be able to submit something
and have the department post it on the department webspace, it can be equally or even more
important that they be managing their own webspace, where they're able to
speak in their own voice and to
share things that they have an interest in sharing that the department itself
may not necessarily have interest in.