Melodee Landis

Teacher Education

Campus Technology Winter Fast-Track Immersive Workshops 2007

The immersive workshops sponsored by Campus Technology are aimed at providing those who provide leadership in instructional technology relatively in-depth experiences focused on topics of current interest.

The first day of the meetings was opened with a keynote address by Jack McCredie of UC-Berkeley. He shared his Top Ten Practical Leadership Pointers. The first in-depth session was on Assessment and e-Portfolios, led by Steve Acker, John Ittelson and Kevin Kelly. They divided the group into 3 “universities” and had us periodically address questions that guided us to establish what it was we wanted to evaluate and how. The rest of the time, they showed us tools and models for designing rubrics, assessing institutional goals and developing portfolios.

The second day was called “Leading the Pack Through eLearning Excellence. Joel Smith hosted. Susan Ambrose presented some valuable “Theory and Research-based Principles of Learning” that laid the groundwork for the speaker I was most anxious to see, Dr. Richard E. Mayer. The rest of the day was Dr. Mayer presenting his research on “eLearning Excellence”. His work offers concrete guidelines for developing technology-based instruction that will result in improved learning. The “Take-Home Message” of the session was:

People learn better when multimedia messages are designed in ways that are consistent with how the human mind works and with research-based principles.

There were vendor exhibits at the conference. Many were highly technical but one new online resource, sponsored by the New York Times was especially promising. It is called Epsilen and is an online “portfolio” of resources and community-building opportunities for educators.

Attachment:

I am attaching the handouts from both sessions to this report. I found the Mayer (Track 7) handout to be especially thorough.

Additional Information/Resources (pdf)

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