"Teach-nology: From Tech Guru to Teaching Guru"
Rich Rice
Ball State University

You're a GTA, relatively fluent in CMC. You participate in faculty development workshops as an instructor, you help others build class webpages, you step in when called upon to help get things running, from overhead projector to VCR to ELMO to networked drives to disks that won't read (and all the flavors in between). You enjoy helping others. You learn a ton every day about all-things related to computer-mediated composing. What they ask and you don't know, you sit down and hack until you do. You love this position. You feel you're making an incredible contribution to the department. You ARE making an incredible contribution to the department. Teachers all over campus begin to take notice and occasionally send you email. Leaders in the Office of Teaching and Learning ask you to present the work you're doing. Follow-up Es float in wondering how to expand TL to TLT(echnology). You throw out terms and phrases that interest you for your dissertation, like "intranet-based learning" or ECAC or Kairos or multisequential thinking. You love it! This is collegiality. You overhear people in the hallways talk about you: "Yeah, a real 'go to' person. A tech guru." You take off your coat and gloves before entering the building, because it takes at least 35 minutes to get to your office. Questions. You begin to mentally schedule-in 45 to 50 minutes to get a drink of water in the afternoon. You divide your evening into two parts: finishing helping up others and going home to catch up on other work. But every day you make new connections and take advantage of new opportunities for learning and teaching students and teachers CMC. You ARE really learning a ton. But, there's something missing.

There are a growing number of graduate students in our programs who fit this description. They are the "tech gurus," the people we go to when we need help, and need it quick. They're not university computing services. They're in our department. And because many students count on us, this "tech guru" role is incredibly important. But what might departments do to keep these students from (1) getting bogged down with techie questions, however important and necessary and useful to learn, and (2) being reduced to "the tech guru?" That is, wouldn't it be nice if a model could be created which encouraged "go to so and so, she's a TEACHING guru" in the hallways? As we merge "computer-mediated literacy" with Literacy (note: capital-L), is there also a way we might synthesize "tech guru" support and (collegial) praxis to better prepare graduate(d) students for "teaching guru" positions?

Back to Town Hall Meeting #1