Exploratory workshops are broad in their orientation, allowing groups of 15 to 25 faculty to discuss common issues in their teaching and to begin envisioning how they might work together in using technology to enhance teaching and learning in their fields. Most of these workshops have or will take place during the first two years of the Program. Workshops on both campuses have been held.

The workshops served a number of purposes: most were designed to bring faculty members on both campuses to a basic level of proficiency in web, multimedia and other useful technologies. We included students in some of the workshops, enabling them to begin acquiring expertise that they will use in their roles as Academic Department Liaisons throughout the course of this program and beyond.

Participants received a $100 stipend for attending the sessions.

Content included such topics as incorporating web and multimedia resources into courses at all levels, interactive software design, technology to enhance lectures, digitizing video, slides and sounds and using them effectively in courses, and using the resources of the web in learning and research. Workshops were designed to engage faculty in discussions of the higher order issues surrounding the uses of these new technologies—intellectual property rights and fair use, moral and ethical uses of networked resources, the nature of electronic communications, attribution, bias and location of networked resources, etc. We drew on a mix of experts to lead these workshops—Denison and Kenyon faculty who have already developed some expertise with technology in their disciplines, outside experts, and library and information technology staffs from both campuses. The objectives of these workshops were to foster cross-institutional exchanges and to enable faculty less experienced in the use of technology to benefit from the experience of their colleagues.