Editors’ Note: Becoming Innovative, Technologically Savvy Teachers

The present, Summer 2011 issue of Human Architecture--a fourth of its annual "Teaching Transformations" series--brings together selected proceedings of the joint CIT/EdTech conference held on May 12, 2011, at UMass Boston. How the two, separately held conferences in the past came to be brought together is a story worth telling before elaborating on the selected contributions from their joint meeting published in this journal issue. As many of our readers know, Boston's culture of valuing teaching and learning has been supported by two annual conferences, one that is usually offered in January by UMass Boston's Center for Innovative Teaching (CIT, formerly the "Center for the Improvement of Teaching") and a second, in May, which is sponsored by IT/Educational Technology (EdTech) and the University Library, which focuses specifically on the uses of educational technology in teaching and research. CIT had organized, as in the past, its Annual Conference on Teaching for Transformation and scheduled it for January 2011. However, because of severe snow conditions on the day of the conference, the university was forced to close. As a result, and in order to not cancel the conference altogether, the CIT Advisory Board explored alternative plans and dates for the conference. With IT Liaison and CIT Advisory Board member Ellie Kutz, CIT Director Vivian Zamel met regularly with representatives from Educational Technology, which holds its annual conference at the end of the spring semester, and the co-organizers collaborated together to hold a joint CIT/EdTech Conference on May 12, 2011, for the first time. The resulting conference was a vibrant, dynamic, and successful event, energized by the contributions of CIT's and EdTech's constituencies. The conference offered 30 concurrent sessions throughout the day, with presenters from many institutions of higher education in the New England area. The sessions included presenters from a large number of disciplines and colleges--from English and Art to Biology and Management--who addressed a wide range and broad spectrum of ideas, such as: addressing issues of identity; engaging learners in large lectures; promoting student collaboration online; exploring new technologies to enhance learning; new resources for teaching and scholarship available through the Healey Library; teaching writing and providing student support in writing centers; addressing issues of race, culture and religion in the classroom; and to the use of particular technology tools such as Webworks mathematics software and Camtasia for capturing classroom lectures. Several sessions of the joint conference included students on their panels, giving these students the opportunity to present alongside faculty at a professional conference. And several consisted of panelists from different academic disciplines, thus modeling the importance of these kinds of collaborations. In addition, the Composition Program, which often holds its own conference in May, joined the conference, where many of its faculty members were already scheduled to present. The innovative meeting of pedagogical conversations and technological know-how in the combined conference could not have been more timely symbolically, for this also coincided with the thoughtful steps the CIT Advisory Board members took last year in fine-tuning its name (from the "Center for the Improvement of Teaching" to the "Center for Innovative Teaching") in line with its long-standing substantive attention to and appreciation of the significance of creativity and innovation for the improvement of teaching. The contributions included in this issue of Human Architecture reflect the combined developments as described above regarding the joint conference and CIT's new name. Thanks to EdTech's innovative resources and skills, many of the actual sessions of the conference may be viewed and/or listened to directly by visiting UMass Boston's IT webpage, http://umbmedia. …