As I sat pondering my vision of what Ocotillo was, is and should be, I realized that we had a problem. While Ocotillo has been a fabulous un-organization which has fostered numerous innovations and helped support many faculty in improving teaching and learning, we were missing the majority of our constituency. Geohagen talks about the "Chasm" between the 15-20% of innovators and early adopters and the 80-85% of others. Ocotillo has been reaching that early fifth of folks, year after year. So I set my sights on how we could breach that chasm.
I believe that one of the barriers that faculty face is the typically non-integrated nature of instructional innovation. Say a faculty has heard that the World-Wide Web (or Collaborative Learning, or Multi Media, or Service Learning, or...) is something they should include in their curriculum. They may attend a workshop or read a book or talk with a current user, but the innovation often ends up being "strapped on" to their course and does not become part of the curricular warp and weft. Even if a faculty is successful in integrating an innovation into their instructional design, their journey has been such a personal one that it is hard to replicate. That is why I believe that the functions of Staff Development, Instructional Design, and Instructional Technology are all critical to bridging the chasm. The Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction is a team of instructional designers, instructional technicians, and staff developers who approach the improvement of teaching and learning in an integrated way. Being a physicist, the MCLI's three inter-related functions made me think, of course, of quarks!
A digression... You may have read recently about the possible discovery of the elusive Top Quark. And you may have asked yourself, "So What?" Well, we physicists are pretty excited because it goes a long ways towards confirming the Standard Model of Fundamental Particles. Big atom-smashers have succeeded in generating hundreds of sub-atomic particles and the Standard Model organizes them into just six Quarks and six Leptons. Amazing, don't you think? Quarks are named Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top and Bottom and they come in Colors and Flavors and are held together by Gluons... those wacky physicists! But, I digress in this digression... You may have learned that your basic atom is made up of electrons (a Lepton, by the way) swirling around protons and neutrons. We believe that protons and neutrons are made up of three quarks each and they are held together with such a force as to be inseparable. You will not find a quark operating by itself, only in teams. Sounds like the MCLI, huh?
If the MCLI works so well (it has helped me integrate the World-Wide Web into my curriculum and, through Ocotillo, explore numerous other instructional innovations), why not replicate the MCLI on each campus? These Campus Centers for Learning and Instruction (CCLI) could address the three critical functions (instructional quarks, if you will) of Instructional Design, Instructional Technology, and Staff Development. These CCLI's could provide faculty with walk-in support for continually improving their and their students' learning. But, if you're like me, this discussion of MCLI and CCLI's is making you think of... that's right! Fractal Geometry!
Another digression... By now you have certainly heard about fractal geometry and likely seen many of the fractal art. You may know that fractal images, while rich and varied in form, maintain a special coherence as you zoom in or zoom out. The "rules" that generate one level of complexity are the same that generated the next level in or out. Nature knows this as I'm sure you've noticed with broccoli. Take a clump (are they called heads?) of broccoli and note the form that all of the major branches take. Then look closely at one of the branches, then one of the sub-branches, all the way down to the smallest identifiable piece of broccoli; they look incredibly similar, don't they? Kind of like the MCLI and CCLI's...
This replication, I'm convinced, takes place on the personal level too when individual faculty set about to improve their students' learning. As a conscientious faculty, you strive to continually improve student learning. You probably endeavor to keep current in your discipline (you do your own staff development) and you likely explore new teaching techniques and tools (you are your own instructional technologist) and you constantly try to integrate the current content, tools and techniques (you are your own instructional designer). I'm not sure if this analogy works down to the cellular level, but I am convinced that it does work at the personal and district-wide level and that it would work at the campus level. Furthermore, I believe that this fractal quark model represents an extremely viable method of bridging the chasm.
What do you think?
The Internet Connection at MCLI is
Alan Levine --}
Comments to alan.levine@domail.maricopa.edu
URL: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/labyforum/win96/win96L4.html