Introduction

I started working at Dickinson as the Director of Academic Technology in October of 2022. Prior to that, I had spent 7 years at Wilson College. We had less than 50 full time faculty. That meant I was working on every area of academic technology and had a small faculty to share information with. With less than 50 professors, I was able to put in the time to have a personal relationship with the vast majority as well as several of our adjuncts. If I had learned something new or was working on something and thought faculty would like to talk about it, I’d see them in the hallways and just start sharing.

Here at Dickinson, I have a full team (thankfully) of excellent academic technologists and it seems like more faculty members than I can count. I still have a desire to make personal connections with as many faculty and staff as I can. I believe those connections are where a lot of new ideas originate. However, I recognize that it’s unrealistic to think I can stroll the hallways and disseminate the information that would be useful to most of our faculty. Hence, the creation of this blog.

The Dickinson Academic Technology blog is going to have a new post at least once a month during each semester. We’ll have substantive posts about technologies and pedagogical uses of technology, faculty and student perspectives, etc. We’ll also have more fun posts like perhaps an AI Generated Image of the Week. There may also be shorter posts showing interesting features we find useful in Moodle, ChatGPT, etc. We’ll have to kind of see where things take us.

We’d also love to have contributions and participation from the Dickinson community. If you have an idea for a post, please email me at dannibaj@dickinson.edu

James D’Annibale

Director of Academic Technology