F-LIGHT

E-Newsletter for the Flashlight Program

• Cost Studies: Not All Work Needs to be Done in Less Time
• Has the pervasive use of word processing helped our graduates learn to develop complex arguments? A dissertation idea. 
• Upcoming Events (EDUCAUSE)
• New ways to use benefits of Flashlight Network membership
• New Flashlight subscribers
• Have a Question about Educational Uses of Technology?
• Learning More About Flashlight( free demo accounts), The TLT Group and F-LIGHT

We’re working now on copy editing for the second edition of The Flashlight Cost Analysis Handbook. 

The Handbook is designed to help educators use data about time, money, space and other resources to rethink the ways they do things so that those activities put less stress on people and budgets.  That kind of cost study can be different from what’s been normal in the past.  Here's an insight from one of the case studies in the Handbook: on reorganizing undergraduate engineering laboratories in several departments at the University of Pennsylvania.

Running a laboratory takes time, which is one of the major components of its cost.  A traditional cost study would treat all time dollars alike, just as it treats all other dollars alike.  So a traditional cost analysis might conclude that:

a)       by dividing the total time (high-salaried) facuty spend in teaching the undergraduate lab by the number of students, you can determine how many dollars of faculty time are being spent per student; 

b)      the most obvious way to save money is for faculty to spend less time per student. 

In the Flashlight case study, in contrast, Prof. David Pope and Helen Anderson distinguished between:

1)       time spent coaching students on engineering ideas in the lab and other activities that were also fulfilling and productive versus

2)      time spent giving instructions on safety procedures, teaching students how to use equipment, record-keeping and other instructional activities that were onerous. 

Pope and Anderson showed that the new laboratory design had reduced time spent on the onerous set of activities while maintaining the productive teaching time, and cutting costs in other ways too (e.g., operating equipment with less breakage when students got more extensive, on-line briefings in how to use it; space used to near its full capacity).  In fact their cost analysis suggested how the teaching staff in the labs could be upgraded in the future while still saving money per student. This is quite a contrast to the fear that cost studies lead inevitably to staff cuts and bad outcomes for students.

Other case studies in the Handbook cover a wide range of topics: time spent in teaching students at a distance, the decision whether to require students to lease laptops, a provost’s internal grant program to support IT development, internal cost analysis by a grant-funded national project, costs of teaching composition in computer classrooms, and a comparison of several on-campus approaches to using technology in teaching.

It's rare in higher education to do cost analysis this way --  analyzing and rethinking work patterns in order to reduce chances of busted budgets and staff burnout.  But we really need that kind of analysis now, at a time when rapid technological change and tight budgets are exposing institutions and their people to greater risk.  

We hope the new Flashlight Cost Analysis Handbook and our consultants can help your project, program or institution reduce some of those stresses while improving education.  The Handbook will be published in a month or so, and shipped free (along with site licenses to make copies) to the 288 institutions that subscribe to Flashlight.  Single copies will also be sold; order forms are available on this Web site.

I like to seed ideas that might be good dissertation studies. Here's one I've been mentioning for years. So far as I know, no one has done it yet.

The following passage is taken from my 1995 Change article, "Asking the Right Questions: What Research Tells Us About Technology and Higher Learning."

"Back in 1987 Raymond J. Lewis and I were looking for faculty members who had at least two years of teaching in an environment where students had unfettered access to personal computing.

"One place we visited was Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where the current seniors had four years of easy access to Macintosh computers. I talked to faculty members from eight departments, asking what they liked about teaching in this environment.

"Surprisingly, there was one thing that all of them had noticed. As two of them put it, 'I'm no longer embarrassed to ask the student to do it over again.'  Because computer- based documents and projects are mechanically easier to revise, their students pressed to get a second chance to improve their work and their grade. Gradually the texture of the curriculum in each course was changing: toward projects developed in stages--plan, draft, conversation, another draft, final version. Each stage of work was marked by rethinking, and by learning. We called this strategy Doing It Again, Thoughtfully (DIATing).

"I also asked a couple of seniors if they thought their education had been influenced by their use of computers. One of them replied that he'd learned that it's not one's first draft or thought that matters, but the final version. In what course had he learned that, I asked. He replied that it had been over a series of courses. Similarly, several faculty members and the director of the writing program independently suggested that the most tangible impact of computer availability would be at the capstone of the curriculum, in the intellectual tightness and coherence of bachelor's theses.

"The day at Reed had a surprise ending. When Ray and I sat down with several of the College's educational and technology leaders, they were astonished by what we'd heard that day. The growth of DIATing had been an ecological change, not directed centrally. They hadn't known that their technology was being used in that way or with those kinds of outcomes. That's because their institutional strategy was the sum of large numbers of independent actions by many faculty members and students across the college."

I've thought a lot about that day in the years since. I have been especially stimulated by Walter Ong's wonderful little book, Orality and Literacy. Ong suggested that the ways that we think -- for example the way the argument in this essay is structured - that the ways we think are fundamentally influenced by our heritage of using reading and writing.  Reading and writing allow us to gradually develop a complex, clean structure of argument. 

Ong's argument suggests to me that the Reed's emphasis, across the curriculum, on written projects that develop in stages, with lots of feedback, is helping graduate seniors who are especially good at creating and critiquing complex arguments.  If my informants were correct, the fossil record of this change in thinking should still be visible in the bachelor's theses written at Reed and elsewhere in the 1980s and 1990s.  

Is there such a fossil record of a change in the skills of thinking?  If so, what does it tell us about the nature of learning, teaching, and how technology use can change both?  Might be a good dissertation topic.

PS Check out our growing list of ideas for dissertations and grant proposals.

Upcoming Events

On Tuesday, October 1, Steve Ehrmann and Frank Parker (Johnson C. Smith University) will run a Flashlight preconference workshop at EDUCAUSE. The focus will be on studies whose findings can be used to improve online interaction and collaboration. Participants will also get a good look at the Flashlight Online system, and free demo accounts will be available.

Next April, Flashlight will be part of a full day workshop on faculty development and low threshold activities at the International Conference on College Teaching and Learning in Jacksonville Florida.

For details on this and other Flashlight and TLT Group events, both face to face and online, keep an eye on The TLT Group calendar. 

New ways to use benefits of Flashlight Network Membership

There are many ways in which institutions can use the benefits of a Network subscription. Even when the subscription was initially purchased by just one project for one particular purpose, the institution can also use the benefits for other purposes: accreditation, scholarship of teaching, external evaluation of grants, dealing with the support service crisis, advising the CAO, avoiding staff burnout and budget over-runs, finding collaborators at other institutions and creating a virtual space to work together, providing a flexible survey tool free for staff and students, ...  

We've assembled some of the more important ways to use Network membership here. Think of it as a menu that could help you decide whether to subscribe or, if you're already a subscriber, how to use the benefits. If you have other ideas (or questions), please send e-mail to flashlight@tltgroup.org 

Flashlight Subscribers  

Flashlight has continued its dramatic growth. Five years ago, Flashlight had 5 subscribing institutions.  Currently, over 280 institutions and projects subscribe annually to Flashlight tools/services. Among the more recent subscribers: Columbia University, Faulkner University, Westminster College, and Wofford College; about 70 of those institutions have subscribed since the last issue of this newsletter in June. 

Our Web site has fallen behind again, but, if you'd like to see if your institution is one of approximately 440 institutions and projects around the world that are subscribers or licensees of Flashlight tools, please visit our list of participating institutions.

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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 Washington DC 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.

If you know someone else who would like to be alerted to new issues of F-LIGHT, please suggest that they send e-mail to LISTPROC@LISTPROC.WSU.EDU with the one line message
   SUBSCRIBE F-LIGHT (the subscriber's first and last name)

Do the same for yourself if you have changed e-mail addresses.

To stop receiving the bulletin about F-LIGHT, please send e-mail to LISTPROC@LISTPROC.WSU.EDU with the one line message
   SIGNOFF F-LIGHT

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