What Is Teaching and Learning?

I have written a few times in this space about how my dissertation applies Roland Barthes’s concept of “writerly” texts to teaching and learning. In my dissertation, I focus on online courses, partly because it is an easier for people to grasp the theory applied to fixed online course materials than a live classroom, but I feel very strongly that the advantages of writerliness can apply equally well to both environments. That my PhD is in Instructional Technology also played a part in my online focus.

What attracts me most to Barthes’s vocabulary of the “writerly” is that I believe that virtually every course, whatever its intended focus and content, should also be designed to build skills that are vital to academic and professional success, of which writing could be said to be the most important.

However, writing, reading, and thinking are intimately related activities that all involve the construction of meaning, and the better students can learn to process and organize new information, the better they will be able to integrate it with their own accumulated experience, and thus to translate any text into a meaningful experience, into an opportunity to construct (or write) their own new meanings.

The purpose of education should always be to help students become better readers and writers, not only of their textbooks and lessons, but of all manifestations of the language that shapes the world around them.

Dissertation News

This should have been a slow week, and I had expected to do a good bit of blogging, but it didn't work out. The best part of the week, though, is that I submitted my dissertation. I should be defending in the next couple of weeks.

Let's hope that works out okay!

Teaching First-Year Students

Dr. Nicole Carr (Sociology) led a wonderful roundtable discussion today on Teaching First-Year College Students. Over a dozen USA faculty participated in the discussion, covering a variety of issues from attendance to strategies for identifying at-risk students to determining where to draw the line between nurturing and nannying.

The best indicator (to me) that things were going well was that the time for the session to end came and went, but the discussion never lost steam. About fifteen minutes later, one person got up to leave and another followed, but the conversation still continued for at least another five minutes.

As the organizer of the event, I kept wondering if I should announce that regrettably our time was up, and that we must now end this wonderful discussion. But instead I decided that this useful and valuable conversation should not be thwarted by something so mundane and artificial as a clock. I also decided that after it did come to an end, that I would use this space to try to continue the conversation.

Teaching first-year students is very important to the success of this (or any) university, and it is an important conversation that needs to involve more than the dozen or so faculty members whose schedules allowed them to attend this particular session.

Therefore I invite anyone who reads this post to reply using the comment button below and then return later and view others’ comments and possibly even respond to them. And who knows, we might even be able to start a larger conversation that will help us all improve our success with first-year students.

Bakhtin, Dialogism, and This Week’s Theory Tuesday Discussion

This week I had the distinct pleasure of giving the Theory Tuesday talk at USA’s College of Education. The title of my talk was “Bakhtin, Dialogism, and a Novel Approach to Interaction,” and it focused on how Mikhail Bakhtin’s thought can be applied to how we think about delivering instruction online. And while my research deals mostly with Bakhtin’s concept of novelness, the majority of my talk dealt with his better known concept of dialogism.

The term “dialogism” is often misunderstood to simply mean “concerning dialogue.” It certainly does have many similarities with “dialogue,” and you could say that most forms of dialogue would be considered dialogic. However, when the word “dialogic” (or “dialogism”) is used in most academic/theoretical discussions, the Bakhtinian sense of the word is usually invoked, and it is important to point out that dialogism goes well beyond two people talking and essentially includes any form of two-way semantic interchange so that it can be between speakers, but also between texts or even within texts, as well as between readers and texts.

One way to think about it is as a kind of interactive textuality, and by that I am invoking Roland Barthes's concept of "Text" (as opposed to a "work"—a work sits on a library shelf, whereas a Text comes alive in the mind of the reader), so that, in this sense, dialogism happens when there is interaction between the reader and the text. Of course the marks on the page don't change, but the play of signifieds generated by those marks does change in the experience or consciousness of the reader. I should also note that we should be thinking of "texts" here in the Derridean sense that any collection of signifiers is a text: it doesn't have to just be words on a page.

The important thing, however, is that a strong understanding of dialogism can help us rethink how we deliver the “texts” that constitute our teaching practice that can fundamentally alter and improve how we teach and how students learn.

More on Michael Wesch’s Video Work

A week or two ago, I posted links to three videos by anthropologist Michael Wesch that examine issues regarding how computers and the Internet have fundamentally altered how we handle and confront information, and are therefore fundamentally altering how we think and even know. One of those videos, A Vision of Students Today, directly addresses the effect this has on today’s college students.

This week, Wesch has written a blog post that addresses some of the criticisms he has received about the film. His response, Clarifications on “A Vision…,” is well worth the brief time required to read it.

Also on his blog this week is another response to the video that was originally posted as a comment to his clarification post. It is entitled “A Vision of Professors Today (by Sandra).” It too is well worth the read.

Thoughts on Using PowerPoint

When most people think of learning how to use PowerPoint, they want to learn about how to use it with a “bang,” how to make people marvel at their ability to do the fancy things, almost as if their presentation is about the coolness and spectacle of advanced PowerPoint rather than whatever it is they are actually there to talk about (of course, no one in the audience will know what is being said because of being so distracted by the bangs…).

My take on PowerPoint, however, is a bit different. I believe that PowerPoint is a tool that should be used to help keep your lecture or presentation on track, both to you as teacher and to your students. Presentations should be straightforward and simple with as few bells and whistles as are necessary to communicate your message. Beyond that, the bells and whistles are at best distracting and are, more commonly, annoying.

PowerPoint is just a tool. It won’t magically make you a better teacher. And if you get too caught up in its bells and whistles, it could well make you worse.

There are several drawbacks to PowerPoint, and I’d like to briefly discuss one of those here (I will discuss the others at a later date).

The first drawback of using PowerPoint is what I like to call “PowerPointization.” This phenomenon first pervaded the business culture around ten years ago, and now it is taking over academia. It is the tendency to reduce everything to bulleted points. Of course, that is probably a good thing for advertizing, but in academia, we are supposed to value the complexity, the wonder, the nuance of knowledge and ideas. But our students (and often our administrators) want things in bullets so that they can read them quickly, just get to the main “point.”

The problem is that very little in the real world that is worth teaching or learning at or above the college level is fixed or objective or reducible to bulleted lists or translatable to PowerPoint. Yet we do it every day in our classes because this little software tool practically forces us to do it.

One of the best takes on this phenomenon was done several years ago by Peter Norvig, who took the liberty of putting “The Gettysburg Address” into PowerPoint. Norvig also has a nice companion essay about the making of the presentation that is well worth reading.

Information R/evolution

Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University, has produced a remarkable series of videos about the cultural and epistemological “r/evolution” that has been produced (enabled?) by the proliferation of the Internet.

The newest video, Information R/evolution, came out a couple of weeks ago and is an amazing testament to how our mental space has been transformed in less than two decades. It also provides a glimpse of how far many of us have left to go in our own personal reconceptualizations of what this epistemological (metaphysical?) transformation will and can mean.

Wesch’s first video, The Machine is Us/ing Us, is a slightly different take on a similar subject, exploring the evolution of information through the evolution of the Internet, particularly in regard to Web 2.0 technologies.

The final video, A Vision of Students Today, should be required viewing for all University faculty. It provides a powerful look at how that epistemological/metaphysical shift is experienced by today’s college students.

As an anthropologist, Wesch is primarily concerned with the cultural ramifications of this r/evolution, but his vision, as well as the phenomena on which it is based, also has tremendous implications for educators, both in terms of how we confront this new reality in our classrooms, as well as how we find new ways to envision and take advantage of these unforeseen possibilities.

Social Texts

There was an interesting article in The Chronicle about a month ago (the September 27, 2007 edition—it takes awhile for the Library’s copy to make its way this far down the totem pole…) that talks about a new software called CommentPress. You can click here to view the article.

The CommentPress software is essentially a template for the blogging site WordPress, but what makes it so exciting is that it allows readers of online texts to place comments in the margins, just like people have been doing with printed texts for centuries.

The template divides the browser screen vertically in half so that the original text is on the left and the comment area is on the right. Each paragraph of the original text has a little comment bubble that you can click to add a comment (and each bubble has a number that shows how many comments have already been posted). While the original text scrolls up and down, however, the comment box remains stationary so that it is always positioned next to the text you are currently reading (although you must click on the bubble of the paragraph you are reading for the contents of the comment box to change).

The real advantage of this tool is that it allows a virtual conversation not only between the instructor and students, but also, and perhaps more importantly, between the students and the text itself. It is a means to more meaningfully foster learner-content interaction, as well as to create a truly writerly learning environment.

To learn more about the CommentPress project, visit http://www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/.

Using the Clicker

One of my first charges when I became the Director of PETAL was to showcase the “clicker,” and since then I have seen and heard many testimonials about what a wonderful tool it is. I have also seen several complaints that is it nothing but a fancy (and expensive) way to take attendance. Of course, while the truth is undoubtedly somewhere between those extremes, I would contend that if you only use them to check attendance, then they are most likely a waste of students’ time and money.

However, it doesn’t take a lot of effort or creativity to find ways to use the clicker in other, more effective ways, such as to increase student engagement or keep abreast of where your students are in their understanding of the course content.

Clickers are also effective for fostering in-class interaction and administering quizzes. They can be used to create “teachable moments,” where you pique student interest by asking a question that leads to discussion or, more importantly, makes students realize that they don’t understand something and will therefore be more likely to pay attention to the explanation that is about to come. Clickers can be used for polling students with the added advantage of no one knowing how anyone else is voting (which can promote honesty and alleviate peer pressure). They can also be used to collect and grade homework assignments.

Of course, clickers are not ever going to be the savior of higher education; however, they can be a useful and effective tool in certain situations. And the more effort you put into finding ways to use them in your classes, the more your student outcomes are likely to improve.

The Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education

Over twenty years ago, Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson published a short article on college teaching in which they advocated seven basic principles of good practice.

These are:

1. Encourages contacts between students and faculty.
2. Develops reciprocity and cooperation among students.
3. Uses active learning techniques.
4. Gives prompt feedback.
5. Emphasizes time on task.
6. Communicates high expectations.
7. Respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

While this simple list appears almost too simple to have a meaningful impact on your teaching, how many can you say you are currently applying in your classes?

Click here to see the article in its entirety.

Chickering, A.W, and Gamson, Z.F. (1987). "Seven
Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education." AAHE Bulletin
39(7), 3-7.

Extending the Classroom with the Internet

While most people who think of online learning think of it in terms of distance learning, I would argue that the best use of online learning is actually in the classroom, or, more specifically, in connection with it, as an online supplement for the traditional course.

My first experience with “online learning” happened over 10 years ago when I decided to create a supplemental website for a Freshman Composition course I was teaching. It started out as just a spiffed up version of the syllabus I had handed out on the first day of class, but I soon realized that I wasn’t bound by paper limitations. I didn’t have to economize my use of space anymore.

I started supplementing my “page” with images and links to additional resources. After awhile, I started putting assignments online, saving paper and, perhaps more importantly, the time I had been spending in line at the copy machine. Then, I started using threaded discussion boards and even chat rooms.

Of course, doing all of this from scratch took time: both in learning how to do it and learning all the kinds of things I could do. However, my ultimate goal was to improve the learning opportunities for my students, to expand the pedagogical possibilities of my classroom.
I soon learned that the more substance I was able to give to my site, the more students took advantage of those opportunities. In fact, one month my website had over 60,000 hits, so there were definitely opportunities. The important thing, however, is that I was giving them things to do once they got there.

All of this combined to elevate not only the level of class discussions, in person and online, but also the level of student performance on papers, projects, and exams.

Of course, it took time for me to discover the various pedagogical applications of Internet technology, and there are plenty more applications out there or on the horizon for all of us to discover. But what I find most important in all if this is that the Internet is a resource of virtually limitless possibilities, and the more we are able to take advantage of those possibilities for our students, the better teachers we will be. And our students will be the ones who benefit.

Using Multimedia to Engage Students

When I was at UAB a few years back, I developed and led the Instructional Media Group at the School of Public Health, which basically meant that I was in charge of the School’s website and online course development. Upon my arrival there, I inherited a system where faculty taught online by simply videotaping all of their lectures. To do this, they would either just deliver them in the studio like they would in class or, worse yet, have us actually record them in the class. They would then consider themselves done with the course before it even started, except of course, the multiple choice tests.

It was a perfect example of how not to teach online.

One plus, however, is that it gave me the motivation to explore alternative ways of presenting instructor-based material, while, at the same time, providing me the opportunity to develop considerable expertise and experience in the use and production of streaming media.

However, I will leave further explorations on that subject to later entries and focus here on one example that came up this week.

I was invited this week to Dr. Sue Walker’s Poetry Writing course to talk about ways to present her students’ poems in multimedia. In order that I would have an example to talk about, as well as to force myself to think adequately about the issue before getting up in front of her class, I developed a couple of short films. I am presenting one here as an example of what can be done with multimedia in general.

This film is based on a poem I wrote several years ago. I recorded it on my computer with a cheap microphone, and then, using video editing software, images from the Internet, and an audio CD from the Instructional Media Center here in the Library, knitted everything together into something that is (I would argue) far more engaging than a sheet of paper with some words on it.

What I’ve done here may or may not seem to apply to your class or discipline, but I would wager that with a little thought and creativity, you could come up with some ideas that would be appropriate and that, more importantly, provide you with a strategy to engage your students in new and exciting ways.

To see the video, click here. And please feel free to provide your comments and feedback.

Some Thoughts on Turnitin

Sorry for not posting last week. I was tied up early in the week preparing for our Turnitin workshops, and then I had to go out of town to close on our house outside of Birmingham. I promise to make up for the missed post with one or two extras this week. But since I spent so much time working on Turnitin last week, I thought I would write about that here.

Turnitin is a powerful anti-plagiarism tool that is typically used to catch students who dangerously (or ignorantly) push the limits of academic honesty, and, indeed, it is most popular among faculty as a police mechanism, as a tool to apprehend students who play too loose with “the rules.”

And that is fine, to an extent.

The problem arises, however, when we realize that, perhaps, students don’t know the rules. Or, worse yet, that students have an unsophisticated understanding of them, and therefore an inadequate appreciation of what makes them so important.

As is typical with most everything else involving the transition from adolescence to young adulthood, a “thou shalt not” approach will often not work, and can just as frequently backfire. Recognizing this when deciding how to use Turnitin can not only improve the effectiveness of your plagiarism prevention efforts, it can also create new teaching opportunities that can extend those efforts beyond just your current assignment.

For example, I was recently working with a faculty member on how to use Turnitin. She had given her students a famous essay in her field and had asked them to summarize it. As is consistent with new policies that USA will be implementing soon, she had also had her students email their files to her so that she could submit them to Turnitin to protect their identity, which she did one at a time. What she realized was that each time she added a new student paper, the percentages in the originality reports got increasingly worse.

I suppose many faculty’s gotcha meters would have red-lined about that point, but she wisely decided that rather than signaling widespread cheating on the part of her students, what it really signified was a significant misunderstanding on the part of virtually all of her students on what is appropriate in regard to quoting, paraphrasing, and citing. So instead of failing all of her students on the assignment, she decided to use the originality reports from Turnitin to show them what they were doing wrong, as well as to give her students opportunities to get better on the next couple of assignments before bringing the hammer down.

The beauty of this approach is that not only are they learning from and about famous essays, they are also learning how to write about (and from) them appropriately.

Reader (i.e., Student) Response Theory

As many of you know, my dissertation work (and my research agenda in general) involves the application of literary theory to teaching and learning. Most of my writing involves teaching and learning in the online environment, but virtually everything I write about is equally applicable to the traditional classroom as well.

Today I want to talk a little about Wolfgang Iser and Reader Response Theory. For Iser, the meaning of a text is determined solely by the individual reader’s interaction with it. It is important to point out, then, that meaning cannot be located purely in the “author’s techniques or the reader’s psychology,” but rather in the interaction between the two, during the “reading process itself” (Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, p. 31).

I firmly believe that this concept, while obviously oversimplified here, can lend a tremendous amount of depth and insight into our understanding of issues regarding teaching and learning. Indeed, it is this kind of interaction, between the author’s writing and the reader’s reading, between the instructors teaching and the student’s learning, that needs to be explored more fully, especially in the online learning literature, but also in other areas of education research.

For Iser, a text is simply a collection of marks on a page that only comes alive in the experience of a reader, so when we begin to think of teaching in the same way that Iser thinks of a text, we come to realize that teaching is like the proverbial tree in the woods: it is only “heard” if there is someone there to hear it.

The critiques and possibilities of online learning

Over the years, online learning has taken its share of hits from critics all too ready to spring. Yet while online learning, in its past and present states, is certainly worthy of attack, most of the attacks are troubling in either their shortsightedness or their tendency toward the reactionary. These attacks, with David Noble’s Digital Diploma Mills (1997-2001) chief among them, all seem to hold an irrational fear that some kind of fast-food-one-size-fits-all-mass-produced-cookie-cutter-reductionist-automated monstrosity is going to kill off and ultimately replace the hallowed halls of academia, a fear that the ivory tower will be devoured by a vacuous pit.

In this regard, it is worth noting that while a library is an important feature of a university, and while that library contains an appropriate amount of “knowledge” or information from which an enterprising student could appropriate a sufficient learning base equivalent to what could be learned in a classroom course, or even an entire degree program, there is no one who would argue that the library threatens to render the rest of the university obsolete. In other words, the library is not the university.

Instruction has as much to do with the provider and provision—as well as with the receiver and reception—of instruction as it does with the actual content to be learned, and no quality instruction or learning can result from a lack of understanding of this principle. Or, to put it another way, the unique advantage of the Internet is that it is not a delivery mechanism; rather, it is a two-way communication device, and if online learning is ever going to gain its share of respect in the academy, online instructors and course designers must never lose sight of this.

Thoughts on Instructional Technology as a Discipline

At the most basic level, Instructional Technology is the application of technology to the teaching process. And while this definition is suitably broad to include the use of chalk, paper, or even light bulbs, it is usually thought of in terms of the use of specialized modern technologies, most notably computers.

And while making computers available to faculty and students is an essential element in the implementation of instructional technology, making them available doesn’t make them useful. Computers bring access to the Internet, email, word processing, multimedia productions, spreadsheets, stat packages, and countless other useful applications, but without a clear strategy on how to best employ these resources toward improving teaching and learning, we have little more than wasted time and money.

This is why instructional technology is important as a discipline, to make sure, as intellectually and as rigorously as possible, that instructors are not simply taught how to use PowerPoint, but also why to use it.

Finally, I would like to announce that the new PETAL newsletter went out today. My assistant, Susan Hales, deserves a great deal of credit for her excellent work on the layout and graphic design. She also wrote one of the feature articles, but you probably shouldn’t believe everything you read in that one.

All USA faculty should be getting a hard copy early next week, but it is also available online.

On the concept of "writerly" teaching

As some of you know, my dissertation is an exploration of how Roland Barthes’s concept of readerly and writerly texts can lead us to rethink our understanding of interaction in online instruction, although I strongly believe that it is equally applicable to any kind of instruction.

For Barthes, readerly texts, which constitute the majority of texts, have a very limited number of possible interpretations. On the other hand, writerly texts require the reader to participate in the creation of meaning, where the act of reading becomes an act of rewriting.

Of course, there is neither time nor space for me to adequately explain or explore those concepts here (although I am sure they will be visited frequently in the coming weeks and months), but I would like to offer an analogy that might bring a little light to the concept.

Consider the difference between writerly texts and readerly texts to be similar to the difference between poetry and prose. Whereas prose will attempt to cover everything that needs to be covered, poetry, on the other hand, only points the reader in the direction she needs to go, gently telling her to go over there and look around.

Another apt literary analogy might be the difference between fiction and drama. Like the prose example above, a short story will fill in all the gaps. It will provide details and descriptions, everything you need, but a play, at least in literary form, leaves much to the imagination, such that the act of reading is essentially the act of acting, directing, and producing all at the same time.

I don’t know if anyone has ever tried to faithfully rewrite Hamlet as a novel, but I certainly hope not.

Teaching Resonance

When I ponder the theoretical aspects of teaching and learning, I tend to gravitate toward two central ideas: interaction and resonance. Indeed, the intersection of these ideas undergirds my primary conceptual framework and research agenda.

This intersection can best be expressed by one of my favorite poetic passages, which is from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. The passage, which is actually the fifth way, goes as follows:

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Now if we can resist, for a moment, getting too caught up in the Modernist symbolism of the blackbird itself, there is a great deal that we can learn from these lines.

From a teaching and learning standpoint, an instructor’s statement, in whatever media, however brilliant or eloquent, is ultimately fleeting. It doesn’t live on as a matter of its own existence or making, nor in the consciousness of its receiver, but rather in how it is appropriated by that consciousness, in how it resonates in that consciousness in the “just after.”

The real question is how can we write resonance in the consciousnesses of our students? How can we design our instruction to maximize that resonance? Does it have to do with the acoustical design of the environment, in the way that we prepare our students to learn in our classroom? Or rather does it depend more on the way we play the content?

Some thoughts on training issues in instructional technology

Learning to use many instructional technologies, such as an online course management system like eCollege or WebCT, requires more technical skills than using Microsoft Word. Training faculty to use these technologies also requires a unique paradigm shift. Most training efforts for these technologies use approaches similar to the teaching of Word, where the focus is on what buttons you push to accomplish a task, and where to look in this or that menu to find the desired function. Although no faculty member has likely ever developed an exhaustive level of skill acquisition on Word or WebCT, there seems to be a concerted effort to make this possible.

This “technical” approach is often criticized by those who want more of an “instructional” focus in trainings, and while the considerable level of knowledge required for mastering the technical aspects of the online systems and their effective use does require considerable attention, this in no way alleviates the need for pedagogical training on these systems. In the same way that understanding the technical aspects of Microsoft Word does not make one able to write effectively, knowing what buttons to push in eCollege will not make one an effective online instructor.

The output of a word processor is in virtually the same form as the output of a typewriter, with only the functionality in achieving that output being changed. The output of an online course management system, however, is markedly different than traditional teaching. For online course management, the concept of knowing “what buttons to push” must go far beyond the browser interface.

Thoughts on online learning v. the traditional classroom

It goes without saying that the digital campus cannot fully replicate the traditional environment of the college campus, and this is true on many levels—socially, instructionally, developmentally, even aesthetically (Noble, 1997-2001). It has also been demonstrated that, even with the digital divide, online education increases access to many people who otherwise would not be able to go to a university (Shea, Pickett, & Li, 2005). There is a trade-off here that is very important, but it might not be as significant as we might think. Face-to-face interaction is a valuable part of education, so vital in fact that perhaps we should, when possible, look more seriously at distributed (or blended) learning, which is a blending of traditional and distance technologies. Regardless of one's particular attitude toward online learning, however, we must recognize that, at least for the foreseeable future, it is not going to go away. While the ramifications of its continued presence and growth are open to debate, whether or not it threatens the core of what we consider to be of most value about the university, it is the responsibility of the university to ensure that what online learning does in the name of the university is not a travesty.

That is not to say that the online classroom should seek merely to replicate the traditional classroom. It is highly unlikely that the best classroom practice can be replicated online, but it is equally unlikely that these best practices can be widely replicated in the traditional classroom either. Even more unlikely is the notion that we could ever clearly identify any kind of replicable essential element that makes the "best" practices best. The presumed existence of this sort of je ne sais quois, and more importantly the qualities that make it unknowable, is behind much of the thinking that motivates my interest in educational research. It is also indicative of what hinders the design of a lot of the research heretofore done on online learning. This mystical reality, this essence of good teaching, is simply not something that can be reduced to a dependent variable; nor is it translatable into any kind of statistical formulae or, for that matter, into theoretical exposition. Perhaps the biggest lesson we can take from all of this is that the comparison between traditional and online learning is at best problematic, especially when we recognize that virtually all of the education research outside of that which focuses on the online classroom tends to be fairly critical of the quality of instruction in the traditional classroom, especially at the higher education level. One need not look far to find that the fetishism of this traditional classroom is merely an unfounded rumor.

Our search for that je ne sais quois that represents the "best" of educational practice also demonstrates the value of a postmodern or poststructuralist approach to education. Through the lens of poststructuralism, we can recognize the search for a reified "best of" as a demonstration of the metaphysics of presence, a search for a transcendental signified. I believe that there can be quality online courses, but that quality cannot be easily quantified or automatically implemented. More importantly, however, I believe that the best university education experiences, whether online or in the classroom, are writerly experiences that allow the student/reader an opportunity to participate dialogically in the production of meaning in the classroom.

Welcome to the PETAL Blog

Hello. My name is Rob Gray, and I am the new Director of PETAL at the University of South Alabama. I am truly looking forward to the opportunity to work with all of the faculty here at the University, as well as with other faculty development programs on this and other campuses.

I am currently putting the finishing touches on my dissertation for a PhD in Instructional Technology from the University of Alabama. It is entitled "Towards a Writerly Conception of Online Courses: A Critical [Re]figuration of Interaction" and examines the role that literary theory (particularly the work of Barthes, Bakhtin, Eco, and Hall) can play in our understanding of interaction and content development, particularly in online courses, but in the traditional classroom as well.

Finally, and most importantly, we are offering a large number of faculty roundtables and brown bag lunches this year, as well as many workshops on integrating technology into the teaching process. We are also introducing a new activity, the PETAL Panel Discussion Series, which will feature important issues or innovations in Teaching and Learning, so please visit our website often for the most updated schedules and resources.