This week’s assignment was to reach out to our community of practice to learn more about our community’s culture of technology integration.
A community of practice is a set of relations among persons, activity, and the world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice. A community of practice is an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge. (Lave & Wagner, 1991, p. 98)
I decided to focus on my community of fellow adjunct instructors, teaching across all disciplines, at the college where I work. We are a large community, varying in number around 125 in any given semester. Despite the fact I have never met most of the members, we are still a community with similar goals, challenges, and faced with integrating technology into our teaching practice. We are currently trying to establish minimum technology requirements for our students. While I am very excited to see these requirments put in place, I have been very curious to know if my fellow adjuncts feel the same way or are prepared to use technology in their classrooms to support such a requirement. What tools do they currently use? What issues do they face both finding and using technology to support learning? Is there anything I can do to help my community with what I have learned through the MSU MAET program?
In order to learn more about my community’s use and practices in regards to technology I created an anonymous survey using Google Forms on Google Drive. This survey was sent out to all current adjunct instructors on the main email distribution list, roughly 125 instructors. The survey was open for only 5 days, yet I still received 46 responses. As with any survey some responses answered my underlying questions, but many of them just made me think of more questions I want to ask.
If you would like to see the survey form I sent out, it can be found here: Technology Integration Survey. I have collected my data for this project, but the form is still open for submissions if you want to share your thoughts, anonymously of course.
To discuss the responses to my survey in greater depth I have created a Google Doc that can be found here: Results of my Technology Survey. But don’t click that link yet! I have also created an infographic of the results with easel.ly. Please take a look a the infographic below to get a sense of my community of practice and our culture of technology integration, it may help to put my paper in better context. (You can also click in the infographic and it will take you to a page where it can be magnified for easier viewing.)
References:
Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Brian M. Claesson-Patten 