I’m crazy, in joy, busy. My work at the NSF Mid-Pacific ICT Center is about transformation of a few small, but critical, elements of our education system. I write this as I put my feet up after the first day of the annual Winter ICT Educator Conference, MPICT’s fifth and highest attended. The intention of the conference is the professional development of community college ICT faculty and administrators. There are over 70 sessions exposing participants to new technology, best pedagogical practices, and new perspectives of the careers for which they need to prepare students with the competencies to meet what industry demands, now and in the future. Today was a high point because the proceedings demonstrated we know what has to be done to catch up; it’s adoption and execution that’s the challenge. Can we get beyond just the implementation of best practices and really do these exciting new things?
Dr. Tracey Wilen-Daugenti, VP and Managing Director of Apollo Research Institute and Stanford Visiting Scholar, was this morning’s keynote. Her intriguing message, Society 3.0: Technology Transformations in Society, Work and Higher Education, truly demonstrated that she is, indeed, a visionary and thought leader. It was the best I’ve experienced from the two conferences I’ve attended. I confess a bias because it personally feels good to be the one that reached out to her to speak to us.
You can imagine what it’s like to be a part of the host team – frantic and exhilarating at the same time. But I was also fortunate to be a contributor. Today, I facilitated a panel on MPICT’’s SF ICT Pathways Project, the most interesting response being amazement at the level of collaboration we’ve been able to achieve between a community college, K-12 school district, the county workforce development agency and several CBOs. In another session, I provided some peer support to Dr. Carol Engler’s session, Empathy is not for Sissies! Improving ICT Education with Empathy and Perspective, because the topic was totally out-of-the-box for our audience. Dr. Engler is Associate Professor, Education Administration, at Ashland University and scholar/practitioner of empathic education. Needless to say, my passion about the topic of emotional intelligence was affirmed. In a session just before Dr. Engler’s, thirty educators made a comprehensive list of the soft skills employers expect above and beyond technical ability but had few answers for how they teach them. Dr. Engler and I share the belief that they must be modeled in the interactions teachers have with their students. Those interactions will have no efficacy without foundation of efficacy.
Add to all that stimuli, there was the beginning of many new connections with potential that, honestly, is still sinking in, hence my feet propped up with a reflective glass of red wine. Tomorrow I look forward to my second session sharing MPICT’s Diversity in ICT Toolkit, the outcome of another project I’ve owned the last nine months (my Baby!). To demonstrate its utility, I’ll lead a web tour of organization and institution sites, research, tools, practices, case studies and curriculum aimed at attraction, retention and career-readiness of minority and other under-represented ICT students. Again, suggesting strategies for the change.
So, dear readers, I hope this snapshot of a day in my life is an indication of why I’ve been missing in action. I promise to resurface more often in 2013!
