Service Design: Thinking Holistically about Services & Technology

Presented at the 2018 LITA Library Technology Forum in Minneapolis, Minnesota.In Spring 2017, our library started to transform how it designs and implements its virtual and physical services iteratively through user and staff engagement and service design thinking. Service design is a user-focused technique that involves understanding and planning for user needs, service touchpoints, and employee and user workflows. This presentation will use a case study to illustrate how we integrated user needs, current and future library services, and technology in the redesign of a web application and the service offering. Attendees will learn the basics of how to create a service blueprint.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146184/1/Thinking Holistically about Services & Technology - slides with notes.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146184/2/2018 LITA Forum Handout.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146184/3/Service Blueprint (Low Fidelity).pnghttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146184/4/SALI-High Fidelity Service Blueprint Future State.pdfDescription of Thinking Holistically about Services & Technology - slides with notes.pdf : Slides and NotesDescription of 2018 LITA Forum Handout.pdf : Reading listDescription of Service Blueprint (Low Fidelity).png : Handout 1: preliminary service blueprint for discussionDescription of SALI-High Fidelity Service Blueprint Future State.pdf : Handout 2: Full Service Blueprin

EDITORIAL.TECHNOLOGY AS A SUPPORT TO TRADITIONAL ASSESSMENT PRACTICES

Assessment in education is under pressure to change. Some drivers for change result from new ways of thinking about assessment and its educational purposes. Other drivers are external and are the result of wider changes in society. Technology falls into this second category. This special issue is concerned with change at the intersection of assessment and technology in education

Disrupting the Technology Adoption Spectrum: Thinking Creatively about Faculty Technology Use

Faculty development at Smith College is grounded in research that has included the use of the well-known technology adoption spectrum that ranks technology adopters from laggard to innovator. Where faculty fall on this spectrum has informed our educational technology collaborations across campus. However as we used this spectrum we found that it was not a great fit with our approach and sometimes created a barrier to more creative ways of thinking about the sophistication of educational technology use. In order to gain a more nuanced understanding of faculty technology adoption at Smith, we embarked on a year-long research study called “The Landscape of Educational Technology at Smith College.” We surveyed faculty about their technology use in teaching and conducted follow-up focus groups that explored where faculty placed themselves on the technology spectrum and why. One of our main findings was that the traditional educational technology spectrum did not apply to our cultural context. In fact, this study allowed us to disrupt the linear nature of this spectrum and develop what we call a “recipe” model of understanding technology use. In this model, the sophistication of the outcome is a direct result of the combination of technology and pedagogy - allowing for a broader range of faculty to be viewed as (and to view themselves as) technologically sophisticated – even when the tools themselves are not. In this session we will share the results of our study (which reached 47% of our faculty and spanned 22 academic departments) and practical examples of how these data allowed us to develop a more meaningful faculty development plan. We will also discuss how disrupting the linear technology spectrum has become an essential part of our work and of our “recipe” model

Disrupting the Technology Adoption Spectrum: Thinking Creatively about Faculty Technology Use

Faculty development at Smith College is grounded in research that has included the use of the well-known technology adoption spectrum that ranks technology adopters from laggard to innovator. Where faculty fall on this spectrum has informed our educational technology collaborations across campus. However as we used this spectrum we found that it was not a great fit with our approach and sometimes created a barrier to more creative ways of thinking about the sophistication of educational technology use. In order to gain a more nuanced understanding of faculty technology adoption at Smith, we embarked on a year-long research study called “The Landscape of Educational Technology at Smith College.” We surveyed faculty about their technology use in teaching and conducted follow-up focus groups that explored where faculty placed themselves on the technology spectrum and why. One of our main findings was that the traditional educational technology spectrum did not apply to our cultural context. In fact, this study allowed us to disrupt the linear nature of this spectrum and develop what we call a “recipe” model of understanding technology use. In this model, the sophistication of the outcome is a direct result of the combination of technology and pedagogy - allowing for a broader range of faculty to be viewed as (and to view themselves as) technologically sophisticated – even when the tools themselves are not. In this session we will share the results of our study (which reached 47% of our faculty and spanned 22 academic departments) and practical examples of how these data allowed us to develop a more meaningful faculty development plan. We will also discuss how disrupting the linear technology spectrum has become an essential part of our work and of our “recipe” model

Aerospace Technicians: We're Tomorrow-Minded People

Brief job-related autobiographical sketches of technicians working on NASA aerospace projects are presented. Career and educational guidance is offered to students thinking about entering the field of aerospace technology

Teaching Industrial Design Criticism

This paper presents a methodology that allows students to learn criticism as a conceptual tool. Expertise is built up incrementally through the utilisation of lectures, seminars, debate and student presentations. I intend to show how this method can facilitate productive thought about many aspects of design, therefore fostering a more mature approach to criticism than many undergraduates may otherwise achieve. This is brought about through considering together the aspects of a design that third year undergraduate students will already know or can readily infer about a product. They are not required to accommodate much new knowledge, but are shown a way of rearranging aspects of their existing knowledge of diverse subjects such as design history, design theory, materials and manufacturing technology and ergonomics in order to allow critical thinking to take place. The methodology can also be further adapted to allow for criticism of various types of design commentary. Various methods of assessment are proposed, and the most effective ways of both facilitating critical thinking during assessment and judging the development and quality of that thinking are discussed

Thinking about Technology, but in Ortega's or in Heideger's Style?

La filosofía de la tecnología de Ortega y Gasset es mucho menos conocida internacionalmente que la de Heidegger. Incluso los autores que en algún momento han comparado sus pensamientos, no han prestado demasiada atención a este aspecto concreto de sus filosofías. Este artículo clarifica y evalúa las diferencias entre la filosofía de la tecnología de Ortega y la de Heidegger. Se argumenta asimismo que las tesis de Ortega son una guía más adecuada en la situación actual para afrontar los riesgos que el desarrollo tecnológico plantea

Information technologies for astrophysics circa 2001

It is easy to extrapolate current trends to see where technologies relating to information systems in astrophysics and other disciplines will be by the end of the decade. These technologies include mineaturization, multiprocessing, software technology, networking, databases, graphics, pattern computation, and interdisciplinary studies. It is easy to see what limits our current paradigms place on our thinking about technologies that will allow us to understand the laws governing very large systems about which we have large datasets. Three limiting paradigms are saving all the bits collected by instruments or generated by supercomputers; obtaining technology for information compression, storage and retrieval off the shelf; and the linear mode of innovation. We must extend these paradigms to meet our goals for information technology at the end of the decade