A Conversation on Teaching & Learning

Like many of our colleagues around the world, we enjoy an invigorating discussion and at times, heated debate on the topic of changing the world in a positive way. These conversations frequently involve education and specifically instructional technologies, since that is zone where our Venn diagrams most overlaps. However, after solving the worlds problems, we realized that we forgot most of what we had said and definitely the good ideas were now gone. Since we use Google Docs for collaborating on projects and scholarship, we thought that we would use this tool to have a conversation on the topic of meaningful instructional technology, both real time (synchronous) and whenever we can find time on our own to add to our document (asynchronous).

Our intent is to free flow our thoughts on Google Docs, clean them up a bit and then post on a blog for others who are interested in the topic. We hope that in this way, we can share a coherent, easy to read summary of our thoughts and yet maintain the open, conversational approach that we have enjoyed over the years, and have seen many of our colleagues embrace. We strongly believe that technology should be integrated in an appropriate, relevant and meaningful(ARM) way, so from this point onward, we will not refer to technology specifically, but as a potentially powerful aspect of teaching and learning (TL). Also, we believe that assessment is embedded in the cycle of TL, whether informal/formal or formative/summative, and so we typically do not discuss
assessment as an additional step. To help us from straying too far from our focus, we will follow a basic outline on the topic of TL. The categories, which we will address include Philosophy, Attributes, Resources, Research, Innovation and Connections.