Reflections on Lilly Conference Presentation

It was Friday afternoon at the Lilly Conference, which was held adjacent to a major mall. I thought that several of would-be conference attendees would take a long lunch or early dinner over in the mall. Each session time had about twelve or more presenters. So I was pretty blown away to see thirty-five faces staring back at me during my presentation in Greensboro last month. My subject dealt with preparing faculty to stay abreast with technology and how we "baby-boomers" are struggling to keep pace with our millennial college students, who use technology as easily as we used to use typewriters. Now theres a word you don't see often any more. As I looked out into the audience, I determined that most of the attendees in my session were boomers with a few youngsters (early thirties) sprinkled in. The sheer number of attendees was an indicator to me that a significant portion of our post-secondary faculty still struggle to keep pace with the technological developments that are now beginning to "wag the dog."

It has always been my contention that technology should be used to enhance our instructional delivery. Now-a-days, it appears that technology is driving the instruction. How do we prepare faculty to adequately navigate the latest technologies for instruction? The plethora of ancillary duties our faculty are strapped with beside their teaching load, committee work, advising and keeping up with the research in their content areas; finds the faculty member hard-pressed to do more.

There should be technology-on-demand sessions; where faculty sitting at their office desks can link to to teach themselves the latest technology and have guided and independent practice sessions. Help should be readily available from the technology staff, not just during normal business hours because most faculty work is done after hours on research and tinkering with the latest tech. tools. Adequate infrastructure is a necessity. Have all faculty been equipped with the soft and hardware to accomplish higher-level functioning with techno-platforms? What is the commitment of institutions of higher learning to prepare faculty; and also to monitor and then acknowledge in meaningful ways their progress and competency in learning new technologies? I had great interraction with the audience as I posed basic questions to them about how they are prepared to navigate technology waters at their institutions. It was good to know that many faculty are trying to get onboard with technology. Now the universities must do their part! Griff