Hello world!
Hi. My name is Chad, and I’m the Instructional Technologist at Regis College.
I’ve been here for a little over six months now, and I’d like to use this blog to share news, ideas, and information in the world of Instructional Technology. I’ll also talk about what I and my colleagues in Academic Computing are up to, initiatives we’re taking or would like to take, ways you can improve your classroom with technology, et cetera.
What’s an Instructional Technologist? Well, we straddle the divide between teaching and technology. It means we keep our fingers on the pulse of the digital world, and try to feel out which parts of this new digital revolution can be used as tools to help in the practice of pedagogy, and to make better instructors, better students, and better learners.
One of the prime motivators for learning is intellectual curiosity. The Cognitive Apprenticeship model espoused by Van B. Weigel in the book “Deep Learning for a Digital Age”, says, to summarize, that intellectual curiosity is a tool, the using of which is learned by being around others who are intellectually curious. This might be obvious, or it may be a revelation for you. So part of my goal is to be intellectually curious about new technologies, and about technologies that may already be embraced by the ‘Digital Natives’ (A term made popular by Marc Prensky which simply refers to those who have grown up with the digital world, as our current students have, versus those who have not, including most of their educators). I hope that by expressing that intellectual curiosity here that it will infect you to be curious as well, and that in turn, together we can explore that curiosity and infect those around us.
Let me know if it’s working.
