Minutes from Student IT Fluency task force meeting 11/10/00

     *JoAnn M Burke ,
     *Julie Long ,
     *Julie Storme ,
     *Karen Chambers ,
     *Ted Billy ,
     *Dan Mandell ,
     *Doug Tyler ,
     *Julie Long ,
     *Julie Storme ,
     *Peter Smith ,
     *Patrick White ,

The meeting opened with a review of the discussion about student IT fluency that was held at the TLTR meeting on November 6. The overall goal for this task force is to make sure that students are prepared to enter the technologically changing world when they leave the college. They should have become lifelong learners who remain fluent with technology throughout their lives. To meet this goal we see four stages:

1. empower each student to self assess her fluency level in dialog with her advisor and to set goals for herself establishing the level she wants to attain by the time she graduates;
2. provide the student and her advisor with the knowledge to lay out a plan to reach her goals by inventorying the curricular and cocurricular opportunities available at the college for moving up the fluency ladder;
3. provide ways that a student can demonstrate her competence with IT fluency;
4. provide a recognition system for those who have reached their fluency goals.

There was some disagreement as to whether or not we would have to establish all four stages before getting started. Some saw the learning that would happen as we implemented each stage would help define the next stage's implementation. Others felt that students would not take the programm seriously unless we clearly laid out all of the stages. We decided to postpone this discussion to a later meeting.

One approach which seemed to garner a lot of support was to plan on starting a pilot project in Fall 2001 with students from the departments whose faculty become early advisors of students (e.g., Biology, Chemistry, Math, Nursing, perhaps Education and Business) and also some students who would normally be advised by Susan Vanek and/or Teresa Marcy until late in their Sophomore year. We would try to convince advisors of this pilot group to use the rubric as a self assessment tool as described above. It seemed clear that we ould have to have at least a beginning inventory of ways students could improve their fluency skills by next fall as well. It was also clear that we would need a support system for advisors as they started working with the rubric with students.

For the rest of the meeting we split into five groups of two and each group tried to revise a column of the rubric. Peter agreed to take all the suggestions and develop mod 2 of the rubric before the next meeting. One member of each group was to either give him the written revisions or email a neater version in the near future.

One suggestion arising out of the small group work was a renaming of the ladder rungs. We recommended only four rungs, names Apprehensive, Passive, Active, Expert. This parallels the kind of learner progression we hope students will follow.

If you were at the meeting and would like to add or subtract anything from what I mentioned above, please do so. Peter