Tabron quote is a challenge to IT professionals on campuses

Judith Tabron is director of faculty computing services at Hofstra University. (From "How to Find What Clicks in the Classroom", excerpted from March 28 Chronicle of Higher Education - http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i29/29a03801.htm):

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And IT departments have to resist the urge to reabsorb the resources set aside for such efforts. Sometimes even IT people newly assigned to the instructional mission would rather solve more-immediate problems like broken printers. The departments must learn how to build the market for their services among faculty members who are not early adopters — a task that takes years.

Of course there are always printers and other machines to fix, basic services to upgrade, and so on. It may seem frivolous to reserve even part of the time of part of the staff to keep looking into new tools, trying out podcasts or Second Life or wikis and figuring out how they might help students learn. It's easy to let the everyday needs push the longer-term wants into the background.

But that is how IT-staff members must help in the development of teaching methods for the wired world. They are the ones who should try out the newest technologies, winnow out the fads or the tools that can't be adapted for use by thousands or millions of students, and figure out how to align the best tools with the best teaching methods. Without that experimentation, the instruction we offer will never be truly innovative.

Colleges may feel that they can't afford to provide any space and time for improving teaching. They may blame faculty members, students, or even society for a lack of innovation in education — and those charges may well be fair. But colleges unwilling to plant the seeds for change shouldn't be surprised that they grow nothing.

It may seem that the seeds are too expensive, but we have a compelling reason to pay the price: Our students live online. They fall in love, they shop, they order pizza on the Web. Their iPods, TV's, and Xboxes are sophisticated technologies. They instant-message their blogs from their cellphones, and they can't picture college having a place in any of this, because we haven't shown them that it can.

It will be a dismal future if the only thing our graduates cannot do online is learn.