Speakers for the 2016 Symposium
Keynote
Liberal Education Re-Bound: Designing Learning in the Emerging Digital Ecosystem
Dr. Randy Bass, Vice Provost for Education and Professor of English at Georgetown University
How might the new digital context—the whole of the emerging learning ecosystem—help us make higher education widely available to and meaningful for an expanded population of college students? Designing for that question compels us to look beyond the impulse to scale or automate current practices to a broader paradigm for learning, one that is native to this moment and is focused on the kind of graduates we are trying to produce for the year 2025 or 2030 or beyond. This keynote presentation will explore concrete approaches to this challenge through the lens of educating the whole person, where the role of digitally-enhanced learning is much broader than teaching targeted knowledge and skills. Approaches to educating the whole person ask that we join the best of what we know about deep and durable learning with the capacities that are intrinsic to the emerging digital ecosystem.
Randy Bass is Vice Provost for Education and Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he leads the Designing the Future(s) initiative and the Red House incubator for curricular transformation. For 13 years he was the Founding Executive Director of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), and he also served as Director and Principal Investigator of the Visible Knowledge Project, a five-year scholarship of teaching and learning project involving 70 faculty on 21 university and college campuses. He is currently a Senior Scholar with the American Association for Colleges and Universities.
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Plenary
Audiences, Purposes, and Projects: Making Writing Assignments Matter
Dr. Stephen Fox, Associate Professor of English and Recipient of the IUPUI Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching
Students—and faculty—tend to think of writing done in courses as having one audience, the teacher, and a limited set of purposes, namely to demonstrate learning, to fulfill a requirement, to earn a grade. How might writing look in our courses if the purposes were reimagined and the audience broadened beyond the teacher? This plenary talk will ask participants to think about writing projects (rather than assignments) that have as their purpose discovering and creating knowledge for audiences that include classmates, young scholars, and even established scholars or community members.
Steve Fox is Associate Professor of English in the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, where he directs the Writing Program, which includes not only general education writing but also a major and several minors in Writing and Literacy. He has directed the Hoosier Writing Project, a professional development network for teachers of writing in all disciplines, K-college, since 1997.
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