Alright, I admit that I am a sucker and got myself into this, but I have to return to a favorite topic of mine - education / professional development via talking at people. Today I signed up for a workshop here on campus intended to help me prepare grant proposals. What it was, it turns out, was two hours of me sitting and listening to people tell me things that could have much more expeditiously been read from a web page or brochure. Interestingly, they gave me just such a brochure and website in a packet as part of my materials for the "workshop".
I want to be clear, that this is not a criticism of a particular instance, but more a question about the model. People in almost every context seem to think that talking at people in a room = learning. Why is it that ideas like faculty development are so trapped in a model that is clearly ineffective? How is it that everyone in that room with me (I would bet) had a very similar reaction (e.g. the guy next to me was reading his printed out emails and grading papers), and yet the feedback the organizers will get about this workshop will unlikely be quite good (otherwise they would stop having them).
Where are the models for faculty engagement that work? Why is nobody thinking about this in a serious way? We had a room full of very smart people and yet the result was a uni-directional firehose of trivia. I am sure that some of those bits stuck with folks, but overall it was not a good use of time for either the presenters or the audience. Is this really where we are at a world class university? I have to say I have been hanging out a lot with technology people lately, and one in particular seems to have cracked the engagement thing to some degree. Cole Camplese has a vision for an infrastructure for supporting innovative teaching and learning using technology. I think we need to consider what the human infrastructure is for supporting innovation in scholarship. Maybe there are similarities, maybe not, but with this many smart people wasting this much time, it deserves more consideration than it is getting.
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