Just for your information, Suzana's job is as much about MIT's use of the Web
and other technologies for internal campus-wide information as it is about
"MIT's presence on the Web", although she certainly worries about the latter
as well. Moreover, much of the training that Suzana does is done by and with
my staff, who have for some time now been training faculty in the use of Web
pages and other information systems. My point in saying this isn't to wave our
Academic Computing flag (although of course I get paid to do that), but rather
to emphasize the need for us to build on rather than replicate existing
resources. MIT funding and staffing is going to be tight enough over the next
few years to make unnecessary redundancy very counterproductive.
Suzana's position also illustrates one of the dilemmas inherent in some of our
proposals: her salary is in effect paid for out of network fees, and to the
extent we advocate eliminating these in the interests of broader access we are
also proposing either eliminating jobs like Suzana's or moving them onto the
core budget -- neither an especially appealing prospect.
I'm a little worried about the persistent implication in our discussion of the
proposed January workshop that the obstacle to greater use of the Web by
faculty has been the absence of training. On the contrary, I think that
training opportunities -- even one-on-one by my faculty-liaison staff, by Mory
and his counterparts in other departments, by savvy students, and by others --
have exceeded demand. You may also not be aware, for example, that the IAP
folks have already scheduled at least one session for faculty on educational
use of the Web, by none other than yours truly (1/18 10:30-12, 3-133), and it
wouldn't surprise me to find four or five other "how to do your home page"
sessions as well when the IAP Guide comes out.
The more subtle problem is that many faculty are simply reluctant to move into
new fields except along rather carefully and personally defined paths. These
paths usually involve explicit person-to-person introductions; broadcast
invitations don't work. That's why we in Athena have shifted over the years
from what was a rather broadcast strategy for introducing technology into
education -- publicize how great it is, and hand out machines -- to a more
personal advocacy and training strategy based on a small group of faculty
liaisons working with individual faculty. (Most schools or departments that do
their own thing, such as EECS, Architecture and Planning, and Economics, have
adopted similar strategies.) One can observe the problem even within our own
Committee.
The point is that working change in this domain isn't simply a matter of
providing technology and offering training; it's fundamentally a mixture of
teaching, learning, and organizational change, and if we don't approach it as
such we're going to have little impact. Doing this requires a clear vision of
where we're trying to get -- that is, a description of at least one way
success might look -- and a clear understanding of why we're not there.
gj
e40-359a/MIT/Cambridge MA 02139
voice: (617) 253-3712
fax: (617) 258-8736
url: http://web.mit.edu/user/g/j/gjackson/www/home.html
key: pgp@pgp.mit.edu