The University of Central Arkansas Honors College recently hosted a technology workshop in Washington for the National Collegiate Honors Council.
The conference was held Nov. 1 at the Grand Hyatt in downtown Washington, DC.
UCA Honors College has emerged as a nationally-recognized leader in online learning communities and project-based pedagogies and was selected to lead the workshop, said Rick Scott, dean of UCA Honors College.
Fifty-five Honors administrators and faculty members registered for the workshop that covered a wide range of topics in higher education including technology and collaborative projects; classroom technological enhancements; information literacy and social networking; data collection, assessment, translating print publications for the digital world; and dynamic web presence.
Facilitators of the conference were Scott along with UCA Honors College faculty members Donna Bowman, and Philip Frana, and Honors College junior Chris Carter, an economics major.
Participants in the workshop learned how to integrate technology into the strategic vision of their own institutions in order to enhance existing objectives or pursue new ones.
Examples shared at the conference included the use of distributed information systems in education, teaching critical writing with extramural evaluation using blogs, and managing team-taught courses or collaborative projects with podcasts and wikis.
UCA is widely acclaimed in the Honors movement for its pioneering Honors College Online community, http://honors.uca.edu. The online community originated as a senior thesis project by Mike Allen, a 2005 Honors College graduate, majoring in applied mathematics.
Scott said he is greatly encouraged by the success of the workshop, which follows on the heels of an NCHC Summer Institute on Technology in Education hosted on the UCA campus in July 2007 and a special Online Communities Strand at the 2008 national meeting.
UCA
