I just got back from the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STHLE) 28th Annual Conference in Windsor. The conference is primarily for educational/faculty developers, but there was a host of faculty and educational technologists in attendance as well, and a few librarians. (I think I met four in total, although there may have been more.) This was a great conference: faculty developers are an awesome crowd to begin with, so it’s hard to go wrong when you’re spending time with them, but on top of that, the sessions were generally of high quality and it was well organized. I also met some faculty and ed. tech. people from McMaster that I had not had the opportunity to meet on campus, and to catch up with some colleagues from my previous institution.
Here are some notes from sessions of interest that I attended: David Kaufman (UBC) lead a session on Games and Simulations in Higher Education and talked about the Educational Games Central game repository . There are a number “shells” that one can take a modify for educational purposes; you simply request an institutional log-in and away you go. The games are even bilingual. Kaufman’s is trying to address the same questions we raised in our WILU 2008 presentation, namely, what makes games successful as learning tools, and how can we apply these lessons to our own educational contexts?
I attended several very good sesssions on TA development. A few notes of interest: University of Windsor has come up with a list of “attributes” for graduates that include information literacy, numeracy, problem-solving, and critical thinking, among others. These are all found in 21st century fluencies models and in the essential learning outcomes identified by the AACU for college and university graduates. This is the first Canadian university that I know of that has done this, and is really interesting. If you know of others, add a comment below!
One session I really enjoyed was about dealing with disruptive students. It was structured as a combination of experiential learning and discussion, and lead us to an understanding that disruptive behaviour is often caused by a lack of transparency on the part of the instructor about goals and objectives for the class/course, and a lack of dialogue between the instructor and the students. How much control is necessary for learning to take place, and who should be in control? I would love to recreate parts of the session here.
There were also lots of sessions on active learning, and I will list some of the ideas I got from those in another post, but the best session I attended was the plenary, which featured the CRLT Theatre Program at the University of Michigan. We saw two plays from this program: one on the first day of class, and the other about conflict in the classroom. I have to say I was a bit skeptical and thought that the whole thing might be a little bit hokey, but the plays were very powerful because they were well scripted, acted, and staged.
All in all, a conference well worth attending, and it provides a great opportunity to let people know that librarians are interested in scholarly teaching and learning and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). (A group from McMaster actually lead a discussion on the difference between the two that was really interesting.)
