Putting learning at the center of educational technology suggests at least four directions for our work. Not every use of educational technology needs to address this goal, but it ought to play a central part in our strategic plans. In fact, we may often serve students best by helping them to work with less material more deeply, more slowly, more personally, and via more perspectives. Second, we need to focus not only on our goals for students but also on the ways in which faculty learn to use new technologies. We know that learning is most powerful when it is incremental, recursive, and iterative.
People learn best when they reflect on their learning and share that reflection with their peers.
From what I've observed, when institutions make the rare effort to provide support for teaching with new technologies, they tend to ignore everything that we know about how people learn best. These are complicated questions, the kind that higher education has traditionally not taken very seriously. I refer here to the range o investigative and reflective activities by which faculty might study them own pedagogical practices. Thus, a fourth direction for our work involves learning to distinguish between issues that bear on individual professors from those that bear on the larger community. I find this to be a compelling and difficult problem, but I must also point out that it is not just an individual's problem.