Not a new off-off Broadway play, but a quick and partial summary of yesterday’s event at the University of Mary Washington Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable.

In a fit of last-minute inspiration, I had asked the six Instructional Technology Specialists in the UMW Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies to present a brief and interesting overview of new and new-ish tools for learning. They rose to the challenge beautifully. Jerry “Running With Scissors” Slezak brush up on his Hawaiian and took us on a tour of wikis. Kate “Baby Blue Punch Bloggie” Cooke shared her experience with IM and Chat. Andy “And He Blogs” Rush did a cool meta-demo of Visual Communicator. Lisa “Trek Blog” Quinton explored the wild wide world of blogs. Martha “The Fish Wrapper” Burtis walked us through the powerful integrative tool variously called “Content Managers” or “portals,” specifically an online community she’s built for DTLT on a platform called PostNuke. And Lisa “Learning To Sail” Ames integrated the entire showcase by means of an online evaluation tool called Zarca which she’s using to gather feedback from the showcase attendees. You can visit each of these ITS sites by following the links in my blogroll on the right.

What happened as a result of this torrent of facts, creativity, and perspectives? What happens as the result of all great teaching? Some people immediately catch fire with ideas and inspiration. Some people’s eyes glaze over. Some people wonder how they’ll ever find the time to experiment with even a small portion of these new tools. Some people want a complete build-out of an immersive PostNuke environment for their classes next spring. (The guilty party will please raise his hand. Thank you.) And some people wonder, with some justice, why all the emphasis on technology when teaching is primarily an exercise in human interaction. I myself think the technology exponentially augments the power, pervasiveness, and endurance of that human interaction, but even I will admit that yesterday was, by design, mighty techy.

But one other thing always happens when great teaching takes place: seeds are planted. This was the hardest lesson for me to learn when I began teaching at the college level nearly twenty-four years ago. I was a new graduate student at the University of Virginia, enrolled in my second semester of classes, and I was taking a class in Southern Literature from the man who was my most important mentor at UVa, Alan Howard. Alan’s Crossroads web project, an M.A. program in American Studies, represents an extraordinary comprehension of the power of the Web, and it continues to be an inspiration to me and to American Studies scholars everywhere. Just like Alan, in fact, though he’d no doubt deflect my insistence on saying so.

So there I was, young and green as a shallow sea, being a kind of teaching assistant for Alan’s class as I and my cohort led discussion groups for undergraduates who were taking that version of the course as we were taking our graduate version. Not by nature a patient person, I was continually exercised by the lack of strong, immediate responses to what I saw as almost unbearably exciting material. Alan had sized me up early on and was patient with my impatience. He took me aside and told me that teachers did their work because they had something they wanted to share, but they had to learn that the responses they sought might not come for years and might never be visible to them at all.

So I swallowed hard and became a teacher anyway.

Yesterday, more seeds were planted by more teachers, or to call us by another name, fellow learners. For that I am very grateful. And I’ll take this opportunity to announce that one seed sprouted very quickly indeed: our student rep to the TLTR, Charmayne Staloff, was so inspired that she immediately went home, opened up an account on Blogger, and joined the blogosphere by blogging.

Twice.

The conversation just got significantly richer. Welcome, Charmayne.