Assessing Instructional Technology - A Research Initiative at Wellesley College

In a relatively short period of time, educational technology has become a basic component of the instructional life of almost every College or University around the world. The ways in which it affects the teaching and learning, however, have not been assessed satisfactorily yet. Throughout the 1998-1999 academic year, the Wellesley Technology Assessment Committee (or WTAC) met to develop an agenda for research on the instructional use of technology at Wellesley College. The work of the committee during that first project told us that we wanted to know more, and to know differently, about how technology was affecting the nature of teaching and learning in our classrooms. We wanted to examine what was happening in human domains affected by the machine: inside human minds engaged in teaching and learning; in human social interaction; and in disciplinary knowledge, wherever and however such knowledge might be encoded. This paper describes in some detail Phase I of a multi-year project. We believe that both the process we developed and the findings of the preliminary phase will be of interest to those responsible for implementing technology plans on their campuses, and urge other educational institutions to see our process as a model