ELI Web Seminar, October 13, 2008 1:00 p.m. ET (12:00 p.m. CT, 11:00 a.m. MT, 10:00 a.m. PT); runs one hour

Innovation, Learning, and Learning Spaces

Special Guest

Malcolm Brown
Director of Academic Computing
Dartmouth College

Malcolm Brown is director of Academic Computing at Dartmouth College. His group supports faculty and students the applications of information technology in research and in the curriculum and oversees classroom technology. He has worked actively with ELI, contributing chapters to e-books, helping plan focus sessions, and serving on the ELI Advisory Board. He has been a member of the EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee and is currently on the faculty of the EDUCAUSE Learning Technology Leadership Program. He has been on the board for the Horizon Report since its inception in 2004 and served as chair of board of the New Medium Consortium. He is currently serving as the editor of the New Horizons column for the EDUCAUSE Review.

Brown holds a pair of BA degrees from UC Santa Cruz, studied in Freiburg, Germany, on a pair of Fulbright scholarships, and has a PhD in German Studies from Stanford University. He has taught several academic courses on Nietzsche and maintains the Nietzsche Chronicle website.

Summary

Julie Little, interim director of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, will moderate this web seminar with Malcolm Brown, where he’ll explore the concept of innovation and critical role that innovation plays in teaching and learning effectiveness.

More so than any other aspect of higher education, Brown says, learning continues to undergo rapid and far-reaching changes. This is due to a confluence of factors, such as the powerful emergence of the social web, mobile technologies that are more powerful and affordable, changes in the expectations of our students and younger faculty, and the impact of the insights of constructivist learning theory. These factors influence all of our learning designs, including learning practices, learning applications, and certainly learning spaces. In short, it seems to be a domain calling for almost constant innovation. The need to think creatively and to innovate will remain a fundamental part of our work to support higher education learning for some time to come.

In this session, we will look into the concept of innovation. Using some recent publications on this topic, we will explore what innovation is and is not. We‘ll explore what helps innovation and makes it constructive, and what hinders it and renders it ineffective. The goal of this session will be to gain some insight into our own practices and to come away with ideas as to how we can improve those practices.

Additional Resources

• ELI Resources on Learning Space Design
• Malcolm Brown, "Learning Spaces," Educating the Net Generation, 2005.
• Ron Abel, Innovation, Adoption and Learning Impact: Creating the Future of IT, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 2, (March/April 2007), 12–30.
• Bryan Alexander, Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006), 32–44.