From the President’s Desk
The Monster Under the Bed
“Children have been seeing monsters under their beds and telling their families and friends about them for centuries.” So begins The Monster Under the Bed, a book that has nothing whatsoever to do with the monsters of childhood fantasy and imagination, but everything to do with confronting our fears of the unknown or the unmanageable. For authors Stan Davis and Jim Botkin, the “monster” is technology, and their 1995 bestseller posed provocative questions about its place in our nation’s schools from kindergarten to college. In particular, they raised the prospect of America being “the best schooled and least educated modern society” unless we grasped the power of technology to transform teaching and learning and support the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century.
Three of the five feature articles in this issue focus on how Chico State is facing the “monster” and reinvigorating our curricula and classrooms with “smart” technologies. These articles reflect the University’s commitment, as expressed in its Strategic Plan, “to provide the technology, the related training, and the support needed to create high-quality learning environments both inside and outside the classroom.”
What is important about this commitment, and as reflected in these articles, is our search for and adoption of technologies that best enable our faculty to teach effectively and our students to learn successfully. In this regard, we have shown an impressive ability to accommodate new educational tools and to face new challenges through their use. We also recognize that, as with research in their fields, faculty must be supported and encouraged to stay current with instructional materials and approaches. None of this can be accomplished simply through exhortation. Equipment, time, incentives, training, and other support services are essential to a technology-enhanced environment that enables us to demonstrate the hallmarks and best practices of a high-quality learning community.
Adopting new technologies, even pioneering them, is not a core function of the University. But it is our absolute responsibility to explore and utilize whatever means and strategies are available to support and enrich what is core, that is, student learning and success both in college and beyond. As Davis, Botkin, and our own faculty and technology advocates know, the issue is not just to engage our students with new instructional and informational tools, nor just to prepare them to be competitive in today’s “flat” world economy. The real goal is to enable our students to be effective lifelong learners with the attitude and ability to learn independently, continuously, and deeply. Such learners have nothing to fear.
—Paul J. Zingg, President |
