The publisher's workshop was very interesting. It was a diverse group of 15 biology faculty from all over the country primarily discussing the technology resources and ancillaries associated with their biology text books. I was struck by the similarities and differences between this group and the faculty at my own institution. The publishing industry is in a bind: it's becoming clearer and clearer that web-publication is going to undercut the textbook market and they're struggling to find a business model that will allow them to catch the wave of the internet technology revolution. I don't think anyone knows the answer.
They've been developing a lot of web-based resources for quizzing and assessment that are tied to remedial resources to help faculty and students manage heterogeneous student populations. The problem is (as several people pointed out) that the test-banks suck: the questions are all recall and teach students that the appropriate learning strategy is to try to memorize everything. A lot of the participants were very interested in trying active learning strategies and were doing innovative things, but I didn't hear that many had found ways to engage students in reasoning or problem-solving in class. The idea that you could use problem-solving to drive the class discussion intrigued several people, but was utterly rejected by an equal number of people, who were focused on transmitting the foundation that students need. Several people demonstrated what I would consider naive views of learning, saying things like before reading the chapter, the students know nothing. You can't get much more transmissionist than that.
My presentation was largely the same wiki presentation I've given before. It's not the best presentation I've ever developed, but people were very interested by the technology and many wanted to use it for teaching. I was pleased that I was able to get phpwiki and tikiwiki running on my laptop to demo, although I did have a network connection so it wasn't critical. There were a lot of questions and I was able to get them to try out the coursewiki for a few minutes. I was surprised that relatively few of the faculty were concerned with "locking down" the wiki, which has been the kneejerk response of the largest number of faculty I've shown wikis too.
Today, I head across the bay to meet up with ELNA people and then come back to the peninsula to attend the SFERO meeting. It looks like I'll even have nice weather: it rained all day yesterday, but today is supposed to be sunny. It should be a good time.
StevenBrewer