The Learning Technology Project

Scope

The Learning Technology Project will focus on two complimentary processes: innovation and outreach.

Innovation

The Learning Technology Project is fundamentally an enabling project, and will not duplicate existing efforts. Rather, it will work to move academic information technology on campus to new levels of innovation. This will be accomplished by focusing on a limited number of technology themes (perhaps three or four of these). These themes are substantive, leading-edge applications that must be mastered on this campus if Trinity College is to move forward as a leader. Development work is not the goal; evaluation, mastery, and implementation of existing advanced technologies is the focus.

Ideally, the themes will be touchstones of the next epoch in academic technology. As such, they should be relevant, exciting, and forward-looking, and will have significant implications for many or all academic content areas. Relevance will be reckoned wherever real learning takes place on campus, both within the curriculum, and beyond it. The LTP has as its goal enhancing formal classroom work as well as individual quests for learning; for personal scholarship as well as for general collaboration; for the matriculating student as well as for lifelong learning.

Themes that are under consideration include interactive web development (including Java and other dynamic page technologies), technology-mediated conferencing (real-time or asynchronous, including multimedia), and image databases.

Outreach and Engagement

Outreach and engagement of the faculty and other constituents of the academic community form the other half the Project's vision. Part of the outreach is instructional. The Director will plan and coordinate a range of activities for the development of faculty capability in the use of advanced technology in instruction - especially with regard to the themes discussed above. Some of these activities will occur within the context of ongoing programs in both the Library and in Academic Computing; others will be a part of the Project's programmatic innovations. These activities may include, but need not be limited to

• consulting for faculty who wish to broaden the use of technology in their courses
• workshops and other training opportunities for assisting faculty members, both individually and in departmental or disciplinary groups,to identify, evaluate, and use electronic technologies appropriate to their disciplines
• identifying and facilitating faculty participation in off-campus workshops devoted to the use and integration of electronic technologies in teaching; and
• bringing to campus respected speakers who can address substantive issues in instructional technology

The other facet of the LTP's outreach effort is engagement. The goal is to make the College an active participant in the effort to understand the enormous challenges and remarkable new possibilities that the Information Age brings for teaching and learning. The Project will provide a focus for the College to discuss and explore academic information technology and its newest challenges. It will provide some structure and grounding for discussions; enlist resources, both from on the campus and beyond, to enrich the discussion; and offer appropriate forums and venues for interested faculty and administrators to discuss and debate, and so to invent the College's future.

The process of outreach dovetails nicely with the LTP's other goal, innovation, by building significant, advanced experiments that explore new paradigms of the use of technology in learning.