My friend and colleague, Dr. Gardner Campbell, invited me to spend a few days at Baylor meeting and talking with a diverse set of people. While there I spent several hours with staff from their central ITS organization responsible for teaching, learning, classrooms, labs, and library services talking about strategic alignment and strategies for engaging faculty. I also met with a group of faculty innovators to talk in depth about PSU's approach to ePortfolio and program assessment. We were able to look and talk about how the Blogs at Penn State are powering a large collection of digital publishing projects — from blogs, portfolios, and even projects like Study Abroad. I discussed our vision as it relates to our GatherIT project. On Tuesday I toured an amazingly well designed student lab space that put the emphasis on collaborative space instead of machines. I then wrapped up with a two hour session on new forms of digital scholarship with Gardner's faculty within his Academy for Teaching and Learning faculty development program.
It was an outstanding trip. I learned quite a bit that will inform future directions for us with ETS. You may download a PDF of my slides I used while discussing ideas related to strategic alignment.