derBlog

So, I started back at Tulane’s Innovative Learning Center today. It’s a sort of a homecoming for me. I helped to build this center and spent 7 years here before going back to school full-time to work on my MFA. The last year was spent as an adjunct in the Art Department. I love teaching, but the economic downturn dried up all of the full-time teaching gigs I was hoping for, and it happened that the ILC needed an Instructional Technologist again.

Really, it’s a great fit. I still get to teach in the Art Department (the one class that I’d contracted for), and I get to work on design & development projects around the University. I’m in the classroom as a practicing teacher (micro) and working with other faculty on projects that improve their classrooms (macro). I’m really excited about it, and I’ll share some of the projects that I’m going to be working on in coming posts. But first…

As I come back to the ILC, the Innovative Learning Center, as the instructional technologist charged with innovation, I’ve been pondering just what it is I’m supposed to be doing. What exactly is this “innovative” thing of which they speak? “Innovative” sounds all perky and cutting edge. It sounds like a widget built solely to feed a consumer’s lust for the new. It probably smells like red leather and costs twice as much as last season’s. It probably starts with a lower-case “i” and ends with a decimal point number…definitely above 1.0.

Is this the “innovative” thing that I’ve been charged with? And how does that fit into an educational setting? I have a real problem with casting education as business. (Yes, I understand the fiscal realities of an institution of higher education, but I also believe that those realities do not justify the positioning of that institution as just another version of the Gap with ideas instead of jeans for sale.) And so the thought of introducing newness for newness sake sends me reeling.

Of course, nothing I’m saying here is new [sic] in any way. These things have been said for many years, in the ILC and elsewhere (not always heeded by the institution…), but as I said, I find myself in the ILC anew. So I am pondering these issues once again, trying to understand where my own mission lies within this position in this center and this institution in particular.

In an attempt to get a handle on this, I tried going back to a basic dictionary definition. Of course, “innovative” is one of those self-reflexive words that refers back to its verb root, “innovate.” The basic definition goes something like this: “to introduce (something new) for or as if for the first time.” This makes sense to me in that I’ve always felt like one of the primary jobs of an instructional technologist (at least here at Tulane) is to help make introductions….connections between people, between people and technologies, and between the technologies themselves. The part phrase that I like a lot in that definition is the “for or as if for the first time.” (emphasis mine)

From this perspective, being “innovative” then does not mean that you have to be the first to do something. It means that you need to treat everything as if it were new…look at it as if you’ve never seen it before and try to figure out how it might be useful to you or those around you. Sometimes these new things aren’t very useful by themselves but paired with other things become very interesting.

The one thing I know that I won’t be doing is attempting to use the archaic definition of innovative: to alter. The institution seems too big (and self-absorbed). Reformation will come from the ground up as faculty and students change their habits (and they are changing). And if institutional reformation doesn’t come, then the institution will probably cease to exist (at least in its present form….but that’s for another post….). I’m looking forward to just looking at things anew…new to me at least and maybe being introduced to or making some introductions “as if for the first time.”

/der