There's a long article in a recent edition of the Times that describes efforts on the part of several colleges and universities to create a more integrated residential life experience through residential colleges or commons programs. Although there were several interesting tidbits, what struck me is the sense in which these efforts reinforce the idea that students are looking for more personal contact with faculty and peers, and a stronger sense of integratedness and belonging with their institution. Makes wonder how much Facebook, and the creation of physical common/community spaces, are part of a larger trend...
July 2007 Archives
So I've gotten some nice, positive feedback from folks on the Innovate article, which is really encouraging to me - given that this is also my diss topic, I'm glad to hear that it's possibly of interest to more than my committee. :) Chuck and I did a live webcast to accompany the article, which we used to give more in depth portraits of a couple of the students, which we didn't have room to do in the article. There's an archive of the webcast now up on the Innovate site, check it out if you like. On a tangent, it's always weird to hear my voice played back to me... my boyfriend told me that we hear our voices as deeper than it actually is because it resonates through our bones, which is totally true for me. Anyway...
One thing that I really wanted to do with the article was to introduce the idea that we need more research to get at the whys behind students' tech practices, and that context should be one major factor in this exploration. Along those lines, Chuck, Dana and I have a piece forthcoming in Educational Technology Magazine (date TBA) that begins to delve a little deeper into our students' reasons for the choices they make about their classroom technology practices. I'm also working on another article that is an attempt to push on the notion of context by zooming in on various campus settings. It'll present results from a survey of 130 liberal arts college students regarding their use of various technologies in various academic and non-academic settings on campus, using Nespor's actor-network theory as it relates to disciplinary configurations as the framework, and the results offer some confirmatory evidence for the small study that we reported on in Innovate. So things are moving right along. :)
