NITLE Conference

April 29, 2007

The past few days I have been attending a NITLE conference on "Teaching with Media Resources in Middle Eastern and Asian Studies" hosted by Lake Forest College outside Chicago. NITLE is an acronym for something, but for what I am not sure. Its mission is as follows:

NITLE is a non-profit initiative dedicated to promoting liberal education. We provide opportunities for teachers in liberal arts contexts to create transformative learning experiences for and with their students by deploying emerging technologies in innovative, effective, and sustainable ways.

The important elements in there are that it is a non-profit organization that works with liberal arts colleges (such as Lawrence) to improve their utilization of emerging technologies.

I left the conference very encouraged. I ran into a number of other scholars that were making use of the web in their teaching and research. When I came to Lawrence I decided not to play things safe.. rather to take some chances with my assignments and research directions. After this conference I know that I want to continue pushing forward with these ideas.

There were a few specific things that occurred to me in the course of the conference:

• It is clear that a lot of academic computing energy is going into building bigger and better databases to house texts and images. This is no small thing.. and I got an introduction to several sites that will be useful for my work. But I think these kinds of large projects can sometimes pull attention away from the smaller sites that develop a single interest or group of interests. The web offers new ways of thinking about texts.. of guiding the reader to a new experience of places and subjects. To simply convert everything into a catalog of images is reductionistic. And so this is one major task of Old Roads: to be a site that sets a spotlight on small creative sites and comes back again and again to questions of creative form on the web.
• I see two main ways of looking at student projects. One colleague had students return from study abroad with photos that could be incorporated and commented on in a website. Such a project becomes a way to get students to look at their world critically while traveling. On the other hand I am often trying to get students to experience the Middle East at a distance through their interaction with web-based programs such as Google Earth or Flickr. Perhaps I could distinguish between a reflective and imaginative type of web assignment.
• I continue to think blogging could be a powerful tool for teaching writing. What if instead of required writing courses, all students were required to keep a blog and web-portfolio? This would help to create writing as a lifestyle.. which I don't think is accomplished in traditional writing courses. It would also provide a site where students are saving papers in which they have pride. Imagine how everyone at the end of four years could have a fine presentation website of their time in college.. complete with papers, reflections, art, and photos.
• I must learn how to do QTVR.. which is a 360 degree photo collage that allows you to "look around" a spot. It probably won't be too long before these show up right here in my blog.. which is where I often try to practice new things..