One thing I find interesting is that many people see a real conflict between good teaching and the tenure process. The best teaching is the product of good scholarship - in other words the very things we look down at (research and publication based reward) are what ultimately lead to masterful teachers. I'd love for us to get to the point where we as learning designers and administrators stop saying that we can do our jobs better when they reinvent the tenure process. I've heard a colleague of mine say on more than one occasion that his research is his teaching. Our ability to research and share is what drives the advancements in our classrooms.
With that said, I think there are issues with the adoption of technology in an appropriate sense for teaching. This isn't a problem with the tenure system as much as it is an issue with the reality of time. All of us are squeezed from every direction and taking advantage of emerging trends takes time to learn and feel comfortable with. We need to work harder to make the case for greater adoption, continue to tear down walls between faculty and staff, work harder to make our services easier to use, and perhaps rethink how we do our jobs to support innovative teaching practice.
My friends in the College of Education are building quite the ecosystem to drive new teaching practice into the K-12 environment. It is the work of faculty and administrators (along with help from the learning design community) who will provide the bottom up push to make change real. The students hitting our shores in the next few years will have little patience for out dated practice, so what will we do to address it? I think conversations like this need to push more involvement across our campuses and force us to ask serious questions of each other.
If drs18 is right, that self-motivated students will find little value in coming to our campus, then we have some serious soul searching to do!
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