9:00am: Poster Fair and Strolling Breakfast

The poster fair highlights the work of the five recipients of the annual Provost's Teaching Innovation Prize (TIP), and CRLT's Investigating Student Learning (ISL) Grant teams. The event provides an opportunity for the campus community to learn more about innovative teaching strategies and to discuss findings from research on teaching and learning. The TIP awards will be presented at the start of the keynote session.

10:00am -12:00pm: Opening Keynote Address: Technology, Diversity, and Complexity

Three trends drive change in the modern university: advancing technologies, an increasingly diverse student body, staff, and faculty, and growing complexity and interdisciplinarity of inquiry.  Each year, universities support a more diverse set of people applying new technologies to more complex tasks.

In the right environments,  these trends can produce positive synergies:  Advances in classroom technology can tap into and leverage diversity. Technology can facilitate engagement with complex problems.  And cognitive diversity can improve performance at diverse tasks.  

This stands in marked contrast to the options available to U-M's earliest professors, who added chalk to their pedagogical arsenal sometime mid 19th century.  The plethora of pedagogical options creates an assignment problem. If I want students to learn X, do I use technology A, B, or C? Should I let the students vote on that?

I will highlight potential benefits and pitfalls of these three trends. I begin by showing the value of cognitive diversity on complex tasks like problem-solving, predicting, and innovation.  I then briefly describe the growth in team-based research, made possible by technology and necessary owing to the complexity of problems.  Finally, using Canvas and other platforms as exemplars, I show how technological advances enable greater participation and access to diverse data, information, knowledge, tools, and expertise.   

Scott will revisit this topic as part of the closing panel event, “Emerging Landscapes: A Cross-Disciplinary Conversation with U-M Faculty,” on Friday, May 5.

About Our Speaker:

Scott is the Leonid Hurwicz Collegiate Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics here at the University of Michigan. He also directs the U-M Center for the Study of Complex Systems, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Scott's research focuses on the myriad roles that diversity plays in complex systems.