Huntington College News Release
Contact John W. Paff, Public Relations Director (260) 359-4048 or 358-7074
Huntington receives Lilly Endowment technology grant
FOR RELEASE March 26, 1998
HUNTINGTON, IN— Huntington College has been awarded a $152,900 grant by Lilly Endowment Inc. The funds will be used to develop a comprehensive technology plan for the campus, help faculty to integrate technology into the learning process, and establish a pilot program in the English Department modeling the effective use of instructional technology.
Huntington College will retain consultants to evaluate the current technology program and help the college's Technology Advisory Council to develop an action plan. On-campus workshops and seminars will be held to further the faculty's use of classroom technology and improve the staff's use of technology in institutional management. Three full-time English professors will attend various technology-oriented conferences, seminars and workshops as they prepare to help other faculty acquire and master new instructional strategies and techniques.
"I'm grateful to the Lilly Endowment for its generosity," said Del Doughty, assistant professor of English. "I must confess that, until recently, I wasn't entirely convinced that new technology was all it was cracked up to be. But I've become a believer. I saw that there's much more to teaching with technology than clever little pieces of clip art and pie charts in a lecture. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that I learned so much by writing the grant that it has already changed the way that I teach."
Huntington College's Strategic Long-Range Plan specifies among other initiatives that the school will "use technology effectively in educational processes."
"We must remember that Huntington's technology program is not about this or that software program or the latest high-tech gizmo. It's about people learning," Doughty said. "We are changing the learning environment so that we and our students get the most from our new teaching tools. All students, and particularly English majors, stand to learn a lot more a lot faster."
"Dr. Del Doughty, Dean Gerald Smith, and the members of the Technology Advisory Council deserve much praise for their excellent work on the grant proposal," said President G. Blair Dowden. "We are pleased that this grant will enable our campus to take this significant step forward in pursuit of our strategic initiatives."
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Excerpts from Huntington College's Proposal to the
Lilly Endowment, Inc.
Strengthening Institutions Program
"At its worst, technology is a meaningless burden. The old lecture on the fall of the Roman Empire remains the old lecture on the fall of the Roman Empire even it is delivered on PowerPoint as opposed to a yellowing parchment. But at its best, technology can redefine the relationship between student, teacher, and subject. This is the way that we hope to understand and use technology here at Huntington College."
… "In January, English professor Del Doughty—a reluctant convert to the cause of technology—began losing his voice. By March it was all but gone. In days past an English teacher without a voice would qualify as an institutional crisis, if not an absurdity. Happily, though, a day’s worth of outpatient laser surgery and a week’s worth of prescribed voice rest resolved Doughty’s problem, and by mid-March he was talking as loud and as clearly as ever. But in the interim, when he had no voice and was forbidden to speak, he managed to meet with his classes and continue teaching by means of a real-time [computer] chatroom. "I was just hoping that that technology would save the semester from being a wash," says Doughty, "but it went beyond that and opened the door to some new possibilities." Doughty maintains that shy students not usually given to participating in class discussions "spoke up" more often than in the traditional classroom, and the instantaneous posting of text and added that the rolling bulletin board allowed for students to carry on as many as three conversations at once. Thus, instead of missing a week’s worth of classes because the professor had no voice, some students discovered their own voices, and in a strange way there was more class discussion that week than there had been the whole semester. Doughty…has since become one of the biggest proponents for making the most of the institution’s high-tech resources."
…."Our goal here is simple: By undertaking this project we hope to fulfill Initiative Three of our Strategic Plan: "To use technology effectively in the educational process." Toward this end, we need to accomplish three things:
- To develop a comprehensive and visionary plan for technology use and management;
- To better enable faculty to integrate technology into the classroom and, further, to help the students discover, evaluate, and manage technology in the learning process;
- To establish, in pursuit of the previous objective, a "pilot academic program" modeling the use of technology in the learning process.
How do we plan to accomplish each objective? In brief, our plan has three parts: (1) we will employ an education technology consultant to help us evaluate our technology program and to set a course for the future, (2) we will award competitive summer mini-grants to faculty and conduct at least one technology workshop per year in order to help professors discover and implement the best methods of using technology into their classrooms, and finally, (3) we will establish the English department as the pilot program in technology, expecting professors in that area to model the smart use of technology not only to other faculty but to Huntington College students as well."
Download the entire proposal in rtf format.
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