TLTR Professional Development Grant 2003

Jennifer A. Tomal, Ed.D.

Department of Communication

ED-MEDIA 2003

Sponsored by: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)

Honolulu, Hawaii

June 23-28, 2003

The International ED-MEDIA Conference was five action-packed days of peer reviewed papers, posters, and workshops. I focused on the paper sessions, both the full and short papers, where the presentations were thirty minutes in length and there were three presentations per session. The presentations were interesting and very high quality.

ED-MEDIA is a very large conference and the papers were organized into tracks. The tracks that I attended were: Constructivist Perspectives, Implementation Experiences, Teaching and Learning Strategies, Multimedia/Hypermedia Applications, Pedagogical Issues Cooperative/ Collaborative Learning, Research, and Groupware & WWW-based Tools.

I attended the conference with several goals in mind. My personal research agenda involves the improvement of project-based courses. I was also interested in electronic and digital portfolio development to determine how this information could be applied to the TLTR Capstone Portfolio committee. Finally, I hoped to gain current knowledge about the use of new technologies, web-supported technologies (like Blackboard), and various software and hardware packages that are relevant to the faculty who are learning/teaching with technology at Slippery Rock University.

Budget:

TLTR awarded $1000 for my professional development grant. The conference registration was $395, the airfare was $610, and the hotel bill was $755 for a partial total of $1760.