Navigating the Human Active Interface

I ran across an old proposal that I wrote with a colleague about eight years ago when I was working in Hawaii. I thought I would share the following concept paper on this SoTL blog post that seems relevant today. The goal of this work was to discuss the connection between technology, teaching and human interaction. It seemed appropriate at the time, and perhaps now even more so with the rapid introduction of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into our higher ed classrooms. Enjoy.

Abstract

In Hawaii, navigating a canoe on open waters in antiquity involved more than checking the wind’s position or the possibility of a tsunami. If you were sailing to a specific destination, your canoe required a more stable hull shape because you most likely were carrying passengers and food stores for a long duration. In contrast, a shorter, more pleasure-driven ride would require a paddling canoe with a hull that could maneuver through quick turns and choppy waters. Similar to ancient Polynesian voyagers, we faculty and faculty developers today must navigate a fast-paced network of connections, some of them unfamiliar, which requires diverse “canoes” or resources if we are all to arrive successfully at our destination. This level of multi-channel connectivity is its own new category of interpersonal relationships, informal learning, virtual worlds, and social networking [and now, 2023 GenAI] we call the Human Active Interface (HAI). 

The future of faculty development will allow us the ability to increase HAI with a broad, diverse audience, who all have common aspirations of teaching and learning. Therefore, the best current practices for Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) will continue to be the best practices in the future, and include new practices like wearable technology that assesses learners’ engagement, in the way that current health tech like FitBit® wristband gauge heart rates, temperature and sleep.

A major difference in future faculty development, besides wearable technology, will be scalability, a hyper-connectedness and a global mobile sharing of ideas and just-in-time teaching. Busy faculty will still visit CTLs, perhaps even more so in the future, due to the type of broad offerings and efficiency models which CTLs will be able to showcase. In addition, however, CTLs will be able to connect and interact with faculty through mobile sharing environments. The new approach will also address how we assist the ever-growing number of part time and adjunct faculty members.

The way that we will be able to enhance our connections in ten years will not just be through technology, but through a combination of approaches that does not rely on a single “canoe” or modality for providing virtual assistance, faculty support and development. Instead, we envision a seamless interweaving of face-to-face, online, high-tech and low-tech, on-demand and appointment-driven interactions with faculty. The interchange and intersection with technology will become so integrated as to suggest an entirely new category of meta-connectivity aka HAI. Modifying the way in which we would like to connect in rich, robust methods will be the driver to navigating and accomplishing the type of human relationships that many of us faculty developers desire to create and maintain on our campuses. The ease of connecting to colleagues will expand exponentially when we engage HAI because instead of thinking merely of how we connect, or the challenges in frequent outreach, we will be able to focus on the concept of development, creating and offering low threshold opportunities, and re-humanizing the art and science of teaching and learning.

References

Paynter, A. & Hargis, J. (2016). In the Canoe: Navigating the Human Active Interface. Unpublished abstract in https://www.academia.edu/15110690/In_the_Canoe_Navigating_the_Human_Active_Interface