>(5/21/1997 AAHESGIT #134/1. Approx. 5 pages from
>Dorothy Frayer of Duquesne U.
>PART 1 OF 2 PARTS
>

Creating a New World of Learning Possibilities
through Instructional Technology: Part One.

Presentation for the AAHE TLTR Information Technology
Conference 
Colleges of Worcester Consortium
Fitchburg, Massachusetts 
April, 1997

Pedagogical Uses of Technology

Instructional technology creates a whole new world
of possibilities for teaching and learning.  As
William Geoghegan pointed out in 1994, however,
only a very small proportion of faculty are
actively using instructional technology, and these
tend to be "innovators" or "early adopters" rather
than "mainstream" faculty.

Although there has been an increase in the
percentage of faculty using technology since 1996,
Kenneth Green in his report of the 1996 National
Survey of Information Technology in Higher
Education notes that the percentages of college
courses using various kinds of information
technology resources remains relatively low:

Multimedia             11%         
E-mail                 25%         
Presentation Handouts  28%         
Commercial Courseware  19%        
CD-ROM Materials        9%         
Computer Simulations   14%         
Computer Lab/Classroom 24%         
WWW-based Resources     9%

As the Director of Duquesne University's Center
for Teaching Excellence and co-chair of Duquesne's
Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable, I
have been very much involved in assisting our
faculty to envision ways to use technology to
enhance their teaching and student learning.  I've
found that mainstream faculty are most likely
to use instructional technology if they see it as
a solution to a particular problem they face in
their teaching, rather than a "gimmick."

Kozma and Johnston (1991) conceptualized ways in which 
instructional technology can support learning: 
- enabling active engagement in construction of knowledge, 
- making available real-world situations, 
- providing representations in multiple modalities (e.g. 3-D, 
  auditory, graphic, text), 
- drilling students on basic concepts to reach mastery, 
- facilitating collaborative activity among students, 
- seeing interconnections among concepts through hypertext,
- learning to use the tools of scholarship, and
- simulating laboratory work.

I have found that our faculty find this type of
conceptualization helpful in seeing *why*
technology might be a powerful tool in enhancing
learning. Lynda Barner West, Director of
Duquesne's computer center, and I have identified
a few examples of each of these uses of
instructional technology to help our faculty
understand the meaning of these categories and the
rich possibilities they represent:

        Enabling Active Engagement in Construction
of Knowledge

* SimCity 2000 enables students to establish a
city and make financial, human, and ecological
trade-offs to develop an optimum growth
environment. Each city is unique and provides the
opportunity to play out factors such as education,
public safety, and infrastructure in different
balances and observe their long-term effects.

http://www.maxis.com/games/simcity2000/

 * A communication professor who teaches
advertising requires students to locate World Wide
Web sites for various advertising agencies.  They
download information from the sites and critique
presentations according to principles taught in
the course. (Contact: Dr. Clark Edwards,