DIVISION SEMI-ANNUAL REPORT
Name of Division: Design and Development Fall Report
Name and title of person submitting report: MJ Bishop, D&D President
Email: mj.bishop@lehigh.edu
Phone number: 610-758-3235
Responses to the following items may be entered directly on this form (preferred) or other paper or electronic format. This report should be submitted no later than Monday, October 8, 2007.
Mission:
The mission of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology is to provide international leadership by promoting scholarship and best practices in the creation, use, and management of technologies for effective teaching and learning in a wide range of settings.
Vision:
We seek to be the premier international organization dealing with educational technology, the organization to which others refer for best research and practices.
Definition:
Educational technology is the study and ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using, and managing appropriate technological processes and resources.
Goals
- Advocate innovative, effective and ethical uses of educational technology.
- Sustain an organization of professionals who study and use technology for training and education.
- Establish an attractive and appealing professional presence that advances knowledge in the field.
Identify division goals you are addressing and when you hope to accomplish them.
Please relate your goals to the three main AECT goals listed above (or to strategies in the current strategic plan):
1. Advocate innovative, effective and ethical uses of educational technology.
i. Re-invigorate our awards program(s) (ongoing).
2. Sustain an organization of professionals who study and use technology for training and education.
ii. Increase active membership in the division and larger organization (ongoing).
Establish an attractive and appealing professional presence that advances knowledge in the field.
iii. Improve D&D-sponsored session quality (ongoing).
Describe your progress in meeting your goals in terms of specific actions you have taken or are taking:
Re-invigorate our awards program(s):
• Our focus this year has been on finding a new D&D Awards Committee Chair for 2007-08 (Rob Reiser will be stepping down after 25 years in the role). We are pleased to report that Elizabeth Boling has agreed to take this over.
• In addition, we have been working to improve the PacifiCorp Design Competition. Our new chair, Amy Adcock, and her committee explored new ways to generate even more interest in this competition among graduate students. This year, we had 5 teams enter the competition (up from 3 last year). Three teams have been chosen by our panel of 3 judges to move past “phase 2” and into the final “presentation round” of the competition at the conference (currently scheduled for Thursday, 10/25 from 9:30-11:30). Those teams areMelinda Sota and ChanMin Kim, Florida State UniversityMentor: Shauna BonaSteven Harmon and Sandra Valenti, Emporia State UniversityMentor: Becky CohenTravis Eschenmann and Thomas R. Jeffrey, Virginia TechMentor: David Merrill
•During our membership meeting last October, the members reiterated their interest in seeing more “practitioner” sorts of sessions/activities at the conference. To address this, we have created a new, competitive “D&D Showcase” to attract and appeal to more of the practitioners in our field. Nine presenters have been accepted into the showcase and, like the PacifiCorp Competition, judges will be on site during the conference to name an overall awardee. The D&D Showcase is currently scheduled for Wednesday, 10/24 from 8 a.m. – 12:00 noon.
ii. Increase active membership in the division and the larger organization:
• In an effort to have our “at large” D&D Executive Board of Directors begin playing a more active role in the division, we assigned their positions with specific tasks chairing key committees: the D&D Showcase (Atsusi Hirumi), the Marketing Committee (Krista Simons), and the AECT Advocacy Committee (Abbie Brown).
• We have continued to use leadership of the PacifiCorp Awards Competition as a “conduit” to divisional leadership. This year’s PacifiCorp Awards Chair, Amy Adcock became the division’s new VP for Communications, as has happened twice in the recent past.
• We have used opportunities such as divisional representation on the Future Minds task force as a way to encourage our membership to become more actively involved in AECT initiatives.
iii. Improve D&D-sponsored session quality:
• This year our conference planner, Tiffany Koszalka, paid special attention to creating good reviewer combinations… with a special eye toward matching graduate students with 2 or more faculty/industry reviewers with more experience. In our communications to the membership about reviewing, we also emphasized the need for graduate student reviewers to be closely mentored by a faculty “advisor.”
Describe additional special activities your division has undertaken or is planning to undertake and talk about how they address the three AECT goals (or strategies in the current strategic plan):
Re-invigorate our awards program(s):
• Once we have a new chair in place, work with that person to recruit the rest of the Awards Committee prior to October so that might meet sometime during the conference and brainstorm ideas for re-invigorating the program.
• Depending upon the level of interest and success of the D&D Showcase this year, next year we would like to further hone the “process” for this competition and would like to propose that, like the “Featured Research” sessions it might be elevated to a “Featured Practice” status on the conference program.
ii. Increase active membership in the division:
• We plan to begin working proactively to define D&D’s role and potential contributions to the larger organization and the community of deign and development practitioners.
• Continue to use opportunities like serving on the TCT Future Minds Initiative to recruit “new blood” to divisional leadership.
• Our “marketing committee” is continuing to work to get the word out about the D&D Division and the benefits of membership. This year, with the help of Elizabeth Boling’s visual design skills and CafePress, we designed and are marketing D&D T-shirts for division members to wear to the roundup as well as pins and mugs (see http://www.cafepress.com/desdevdiv/). The $1 profit that we are making on each sale will go into future D&D programming.
iii. Improve D&D-sponsored session quality:
• We are experimenting this year with shorter, themed sessions combined with a discussant… sort of like the AERA model. The idea is for presenters to have papers prepared in advance to share with the rest of the group and the discussant and for them to all coordinate at some level prior to the conference.
• We’ve noted that we’re having some problem with reviewers not understanding the differences among proposals to present research, proposals to present theory/concepts, and proposals to present practice. We are in the process of creating a flyer for this year’s conference that invites proposals in all 3 areas and makes very clear what should be included in each. In addition, we have crafted a rubric for prospective presenters and for reviewers that makes clear how to evaluate each proposal type. Proposers will be asked to indicate the proposal “type” as part of their title and reviewers will identify which proposal type they’re best suited to evaluate based on their experience/expertise.
How well do you feel your division is operating and meeting its goals? Please tell us why you think things are going well or less well:
While we feel we have made progress toward meeting the goals described here, there are many others we have in mind that we would like to be able to pursue… but the overly-burdensome “logistics” of divisional conference planning seems to keep us from making much additional progress. We would much prefer to focus our energies on contributing to initiatives like Future Minds and those higher-level objectives that have now been laid out by AECT’s new strategic plan. That said, if the Board is hoping the divisions will make more than just superficial contributions to those larger organizational goals, then, in our view, we must first find a way to streamline conference planning and become more efficient overall as an organization.
Do you need anything special from AECT to support your division plans? If so, please tell us what you need and when:
See above.
Are you requesting an allocation from AECT against the $500 maximum? X YES o NO
If so, how much are you requesting and please tell exactly how it would be expended:
As mentioned in our addendum to the Spring 2007 report, we will be using our $500 to pay for the plaques that the D&D Awards recipients receive.
Do you have any additional comments or suggestions to make? If so, please provide them here:
The D&D Executive Board was pleased to see the development of the AECT Strategic Plan and would like to be actively engaged in helping the organization meet its higher-level objectives. Please continue to consider ways in which the larger organization might involve the divisions other than relying on them solely for conference planning help and member recruitment.
