Teaching with Technology - Let's Think & Write & Talk About It!

You've made your way to the blog for a graduate course at Michigan State University called Teaching with Technology. The course is offered by the College of Arts & Letters at MSU, though it is appropriate for a wide range of scholars, teachers, and others who want to learn more about how technology, teaching, and learning intersect.

Members of the class will post and comment here; if you are visiting, please feel free to comment as well. If you are robot, we do not wish to hear about the virtues of various types of berries or other natural products for weight loss. Please move along.

Feel free to look at the 100+ posts from last year - you may find them helpful! Class project descriptions are available via the "projects" tab near the top of the page. The course syllabus is here. You will need an MSUnet ID to access it.


A Little About Me

My "Bookcase" Faculty Shot

I'm Bill Hart-Davidson, an Associate Professor in Rhetoric & Writing at MSU in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric & American Cultures. I co-direct the Writing in Digital Environments research center at MSU along with Jeff Grabill. I also direct the Rhetoric & Writing graduate program.

I've made the theory, practice, and design of resources for teaching with technology an important part of my career for a long time. My dissertation focused on this topic, in fact, and I was able to show that writing technologies like software, hardware, and even network protocols enact pedagogies that reflect not only the views of an instructor, but of students and the designers of those technologies as well. This can make a networked classroom, for instance, a complex place to teach and learn as competing ideas about how this is best accomplished abound. Engagement with the challenges of teaching with technology, then, is an essential part of developing effective pedagogy.

One way instructors can most effectively engage technology in the pursuit of effective teaching is to develop their own resources, including software & systems meant to fulfill unmet needs of fellow teachers or students. Recently my colleagues Jeff Grabill, Mike McLeod, and I with the assistance of partners at Red Cedar Solutions Group in Okemos, MI have done just that. We've created Eli, a web-based service for coordinating and evaluating peer and other types of writing review in educational settings. Eli is the first of what we hope will be many solutions that address the complexity of teaching and learning in digital environments.

I'm looking forward to a great Summer Session! Let's talk about Teaching with Technology!