I think technology is now a fact of life in higher education,
and so we really have two choices:
we can ignore or we can address it very directly
to see what is productive and not very productive about it.
So we try to take the responsible route and address it very directly.
I think the most exciting developments are really on the pedagogical side.
People are really getting excited about opening up the classroom,
rethinking the role of teachers, rethinking the role of students,
rethinking even things as fundamental as what does it mean to be a student.
What does it mean to read a text and respond to a text?
We made a bunch of assumptions about the book
and they held steady for a very long time.
But now in an age of e-books, in an age of network technologies,
and an age of online reading and heavy electronic collaboration,
we see a lot of our old assumptions being challenged in interesting ways.
So technology is helping us see fundamental things that we have taken for granted.
My colleagues have responded very positively
to the Teaching with Technology Certificate.
Even those who aren't technology oriented know
that this is something we need to pay attention to.
And I think they have been positive because they see that
in English we take a very balanced approach.
We see it for all the positives and all the negative things.
And they appreciate that.
I very much like the rubric that ETS has put together.
But I am especially partial to the [teaching] philosophy statement.
I think it's not a difficult task to integrate technologies into
your classroom and to collect examples of technology integration.
I think it's another matter to develop a very thoughtful philosophy about
teaching with technology and to be able to articulate that,
not only to your students, but to your peers and to upper administration.
So I am most taken by those portfolios that have a very smart coherent,
thoughtful articulation of a teaching with technology philosophy.
The hurdles used to be technological for the most part,
but I think the Blogs at Penn State environment has kind of levelled out those concerns.
So no longer do the students have to go and figure out Dreamweaver and
figure out FTP and figure a bunch of disjointed technologies.
Now they can go to Blogs at Penn State, work with a template and
I think that's been very helpful.
I think the challenge for our students is figuring out specifically how to
integrate technology into the courses that they're doing.
And I think people in chemistry will do it one way;
people within English may very well do it another way.
I would encourage that person to look out into their disciplines and
to understand to the value systems in the disciplines
that are associated with technology.
The portfolio has to serve students when they leave Penn State,
and the portfolio has to make sense to a larger disciplinary community.
In English these job ads increasingly call for more and more and more skills.
And increasingly, teaching with technology is becoming a primary skill.
So it doesn't really matter if someone is studying literature or rhetoric or
creative writing - teaching with technology is now something that all universities
want their teachers to be able to do, and do productively.
I think completing the portfolio helps give teachers a level of confidence
that they might not have otherwise.
One of the brilliant things about the portfolio is that it asks teachers
to make explicit all of their resources and
all of their thinking about those resources.
So the reflective pieces that the portfolio requires
is very crucial to a teacher's development.
And I think after putting a portfolio together,
teachers can be much more confident into their ability to go into a classroom,
whether that classroom involves technology or not.
I think the program is really a terrific program.
English was one of the very first departments involved, and
I'm think I'm correct in saying that we the very first two portfolios at Penn State.
And we were thrilled by that, and we continue to work very hard to produce portfolios.