Otterbein College Visit - September 2008

This past week I had an opportunity to visit Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio. I had been invited by Leslie Ortquist-Ahrens, the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning to facilitate a workshop on Teaching with Technology and on Collaborative Web-Based Technologies.

To begin, Otterbein College was established in 1847 as a university for the Church of the United Brethern in Christ. Phillip William Otterbein was considered to be the spirtual leader of this Church with later merged with the Methodist Church to become the United Methodist Church. There are currently around 3,100 students attending this private liberal arts College with approximately 150 full time faculty members.

I immediately felt a strong sense of communty upon my arrival on campus. People from different Faculties knew each other and everyone appeared to have a strong teaching focus. The morning session on Teaching with Technology was held in a large meeting room with participants arranged at 8 tables. From my perspective, this session went relatively well as the participants appeared to be engaged in table and large group discussions about how technology could be used to support Chickering and Gamson's (1987) Seven Principles of Good Practice in Education. The afternoon session on Collaborative Learning Technologies was held in a computer lab and potentially was a bit more chaotic. I myself find it difficult to focus on a speaker when I have a computer in front of me. I tried to modify the session by providing an overview to 8 categories of collaborative web-based technologies and then providing the participants with time to experiment with each of them.

I created a wiki to support both sessions and I'll be curious to see if anyone uses this tool to post follow-up resources from the session. And of course, I took a few pictures to record my trip :)