One of these days I’m going to have to figure out how to tweak my blog’s CSS so that I can get my SUNY-specific blogroll section up. In the meantime, I’m going to keep pointing to SUNY bloggers from time to time. Today’s entry is from Alex Reid at SUNY Cortland, in which he reflects on the challenge of getting faculty literate in video and other multimedia forms. Alex calls this “information literacy”, which makes me think of charts, statistics, and search engine proficiency, but his definition is more expansive and provocative:
When we talk about “information literacy,” we have to begin by recognizing that print literacy is one part of information literacy. We also have to realize, as I have written about before, that print literacy is not a universal form of literacy. That is, you don’t become literate about the digital world by reading books. Sure there might be some transfer, just as learning about tennis might help you play golf. Maybe. There are obviously some baseline skills, the kind my 6-year old daughter is learning, that are perhaps universal, but they are not the kind of skills that in and of themselves will make one “literate” in the way we hope our students will become.
The problem, of course, is that getting faculty information-literate (in Alex’s expansive sense of the term) is a huge task:
Right now, I’d say less than 5% of the faculty at my College or any college for that matter would be capable of teaching in this context. Graduate schools do not prepare their students for working in such an environment; virtually no faculty produce non-print scholarship or research or produce any non-print media for any reason (PowerPoint presentations excepted).
Even assuming you could convince 2/3 of the faculty that they needed to acquire this literacy and incorporate it into their teaching (which is probably the wildest assumption anyone could imagine), the faculty development task would be mind-blowing. Imagine helping 150 faculty reach even the level of information literacy we might target for our students. Sure. You could have them come in every day for a month in the summer. Then you could provide them with support all year long as they integrated what they learned into their courses.
Then you could have them come back the next summer to learn about all the new developments over the past year. And the year after that. And the next year. And so on.
Of course, you’d have to pay them for that month, so you’d only increase the cost of faculty by about 10%. That’s not too bad, right?
Oh yeah. You’d also have to reduce your research expectations b/c everyone at my college anyway gets 90% of their research done in the summer and you’d have just taken away 1/3 of the time we have to do that.
Ouch.
The post is worth reading in its entirety. Since embedded in Alex’s notion of literacy is the ability to produce multimedia, the challenge is really how to make it easier for faculty to learn these skills. While there is no question that some of this is generational and won’t change until a whole bunch of people retire, surely we must be able to do more than just nibble around the edges in the meantime….
…Mustn’t we?…
…Please?…
Michael:
I think you’re overlooking one particularly unique facet of higher ed: faculty don’t necessarily have to produce media themselves. We have a wealth of student knowledge and talent available to us, all we have to do is find a way to utilize them. For instance, regard what Ithaca College has done in this respect: all the material they’ve linked on their accomplishments page was created using student workers (graphics designer, programmer, still/videographer) and one, count ’em, ONE instructional designer.
X will be talking to one of his profs this week along a similiar vein. The goal as initially defined is to produce a series of video fieldtrips. We happen to have a TV/Radio program here, and I’m sure we can find a way for these students to earn credit while they create a product for us.
Box? What box? Why bound your creativity by limitations? 🙂
X
On of the challenges I’ve seen this lack of tie in with the tenure/promotion process for publishing online, creeating online courses, and producing multimedia.
I’ve been involved in a number of multimedia projects with faculty over the years, however they have all been essentially ‘volunteer’ time on the faculty’s part. In my opinion this has the effect of keeping the younger, perhaps as a group more digitally literate, from spending much of their time on producing multimedia learning content.
I would think that among institutions that tie some part of the promotion/tenure process into producing multimedia content, you would see a dramatic rise in faculty interest in publishing online learning content.
Good point. Which brings us back to X’s suggestion that other parties (students, support staff) do a lot of the production. It’s hardly an ideal solution but is probably more practical than changing tenure requirements at an institution–at least in the short term.