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F-LIGHT
E-Newsletter for the Flashlight Program
SUMMARY OF JUNE 2002 ISSUE
- Case Study on how Faculty Learn to Use Technology: The Role of Low Threshold Applications
- Suggestions for Future Assessment and Research on Low Threshold Applications
- Flashlight expansion and upgrades - Time to Subscribe?
- Upcoming Events
- New Flashlight subscribers
- Have a Question about Educational Uses of Technology?
- Learning More About Flashlight( free demo accounts), The TLT Group and F-LIGHT
Flashlight Case Study
A Report From The Rochester Institute of Technology on How Faculty are Learning to Use Online Strategies: The Role of Low Threshold Applications (LTAs)
This abstract of a study by Belle and Rappold at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) points up how important informal learning has been for faculty who use online strategies in their teaching. Most of what faculty have learned they credit to personal discovery and collegial aid, not to workshops. Faculty development workshops seem to play a relatively minor role.
Click here to see the abstract of the Belle/Rappold study, including some of their findings.
Ideas for Future Assessment and Research
(Including Potential Dissertation Topics)
Using Data to Improve the Effectiveness of Low Threshold Applications of Technology in Teaching and Learning
Studies of how faculty learn new approaches to using technology have focused mainly on designed faculty development programs, often using workshops. As the preceding study suggests, however, faculty learning often consists of many small, self-directed and perhaps accidental steps. The TLT Group has been collecting such "low threshold applications" and developing strategies for spreading these ideas more widely and swiftly. On Tuesday, June 25, for example, the "LTA of the Week" leading off our weekly webcast (on information literacy that week) was Flashlight Online. If you'd like to watch and hear an archive of that webcast, go to http://www.tltgroup.org/calendar/interviewarchives2001.htm
This essay suggests how certain types of assessment can help LTAs work better:
a) helping faculty to "debug" their new approaches to teaching. For example, having spent 20 minutes learning how to use PowerPoint to support a lecture, what sort of a survey might help faculty get useful feedback from students about how to improve technique?
b) for teaching-learning programs and institutions seeking to make this informal learning become richer, more frequent, and even more directed.
Click here to see the text of the essay.
Interested in working on this with us? Come to our two-day workshop at Syllabus in July!
Flashlight Expansion and Upgrades! Time to Subscribe?
The Flashlight collection of tool kits, study packages, rubrics, tutorials and other evaluation resources has probably quadrupled in scope since the last time you looked. In contrast to our many free resources, most of these resources are available (by site license) only to subscribers. If your institution subscribes, in other words, all its staff and students have free access to all these resources (plus everything new, upgrades, etc. for as long as the institution subscribes).
In addition, Flashlight Online has been upgraded: it's even easier now to use surveys created by authors around the world as a 'rough draft' for your own work and to return the favor by publishing your own for their use. Creating surveys that look just the way you want is now possible too: your own logo, font, explanatory text between sections or at the end. And its easier to use Flashlight Online to create sets of surveys for multiple sections, or multiple courses. If you haven't seen Flashlight Online in the last month and your institution would like to consider subscribing to the Flashlight Network or Tool Series Plus in order to get it, send e-mail to flashorder@tltgroup.org .
Upcoming Events
Workshop on Institutional Evaluations of Course Management System Use
Steve Ehrmann will run a day-long workshop on using the new Flashlight study package to assess and improve the educational benefits of using course management systems. The workshop is at WebCT's user conference in Boston this July. We're grateful to WebCT for its generous support of the development of this package, which can be used to evaluate the use of any course management system.
Syllabus 2002: Preconference Workshop on Using and Assessing Low Threshold Applications and Activities
Steve Gilbert and Steve Ehrmann (a.k.a. "The Two Steves") will run a two-day preconference workshop at Syllabus 2002 in Santa Clara, California on "low threshold applications and activities". Hardware and software (the applications) and ways of using them to improve teaching (activities) that take so little user time, and require so little institutional training or support, that they can spread rapidly and widely. The workshop is for faculty members and, even more, for people with responsibility for supporting improved teaching and faculty uses of technology. Together we'll review and expand our catalogue of LTA's, discuss how to assess needs for them and their use, and explore ways of spreading their use even more rapidly. Syllabus 2002 runs July 27-31.
For more Flashlight and TLT Group events, keep an eye on The TLT Group calendar.
Flashlight Subscribers
Among our newer Network members: University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, University of Connecticut at Storrs, DeVry University - Orlando. The University of Central Florida is now a Tool Series Plus subscriber. Currently, over 180 institutions and projects subscribe annually to Flashlight tools/services. For an almost-current list of the approximately 340 institutions and projects around the world that are subscribers or licensees of Flashlight tools, please visit our list of participating institutions.
Have a Question about Educational Uses of Technology?
Sometimes you just need a bit of help - a contact, an idea, a reaction. We try to be as helpful as we can, so drop us an e-mail and let us know what's on your mind.
About Flashlight (including free demonstration accounts), the TLT Group, and F-LIGHT (starting and stopping subscriptions)
The Flashlight Program for the Study and Improvement of Educational Uses of Technology is part of the non-profit TLT Group, Inc. We're headquartered in Takoma Park MD with staff in Texas and Indiana, and Senior Associates around the world. Our thanks to Washington State University for their many ways of supporting Flashlight, including providing the listproc for distribution of F-LIGHT notices. We are also grateful to St. Edward's University and Indiana University for extensive support for Flashlight; to the corporate sponsors of The TLT Group; and to funders whose dedication to higher education has aided the TLT Group's work, including Annenberg/CPB, APS, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), and the National Science Foundation.
If your institution needs to get a better look at Flashlight Online, the best way is for someone at your institution to request a temporary, free demonstration account. Send e-mail to Flashlight@tltgroup.org with the header "Free Demo Account" to ask for details. One account per institution, please.
The TLT Group publishes F-LIGHT every month or three. You can see the name of the author-editor at the bottom of this message; please feel free to send me mail about issues of evaluation or research on teaching, learning and technology.
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Stephen C. Ehrmann, Ph.D.
Director of the Flashlight Program and
Editor, F-LIGHT
The Teaching, Learning and Technology Group
One Columbia Avenue
Takoma Park, MD 20912
http://www.tltgroup.org
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