My experience is the greatest stress comes from trying to use campus based
technology, such as downloading grade rosters, finding what I need, and
filing grades. For example, I and my staff have found that Degree Navigator
has some nice things in it but for us, with over 800 undergraduates, the
system is completely digital while most if not all, undergraduate records
must be on paper to facilitate faculty advisor needs. Can you imagine
having 30 faculty with access to modify a students degree requirements; I
can and have chosen to avoid the digital nightmare. In other words, it is
possible to develop nice software, but not by software engineers. I
anticipate next campus effort to standardize to some type of "teaching"
software will be the next stress. As I learned in SITT some years ago, if
you want it to work for you, develop it yourself.
Graham A. E. Gall
Department of Animal Science
University of California
Davis, CA 95616
Office: (530) 752-1257
Fax: (530) 752-0175
E-mail: gaegall@ucdavis.edu
Web: gallweb.ucdavis.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Walters [mailto:rfwalters@ucdavis.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2001 9:35 AM
To: fiat@ucdavis.edu
Subject: stress, technology and teaching
Good people:
Will Davis from TRC sent this along. hope none of you felt stressed
by SITT!
dick walters
>From will.davis@ucdavis.edu Mon Aug 13 10:16 PDT 2001
From: Will Davis <will.davis@ucdavis.edu>
Subject: tech and stress article
Hmmm. Interesting. Keeping up with technology was ranked as second
only to general time constraints for inducing stress. I suspect
journalism faculty are no different than most.
Will
Friday, August 10, 2001
http://chronicle.com/free/2001/08/2001081003t.htm
Technology Causes Stress for Journalism Professors, Report Says
By SUSANNAH DAINOW
Technology -- both learning to use it and trying to keep up with it
-- causes journalism professors significant amounts of stress,
according to a new report by
three researchers at the Indiana University School of Journalism.
"Most journalism and mass-communication educators harbor basically
positive feelings about the technology in their professional lives,"
says the report, which
was released this week. "But that doesn't mean the technology doesn't
bring stress as well."
The report is based on a study, conducted during the past year, for
which the researchers surveyed more than 450 journalism professors
and administrators
about their attitudes toward technology and about its impact on their
professional lives.
Among six categories of stress factors, technology ranked second only
to general time constraints in the amount of stress caused to the
faculty members
surveyed, surpassing even worries about tenure and personal issues.
For 73 percent of the faculty members and 74 percent of the
administrators, technology
caused a moderate or great deal of stress every day.
Technology-induced stress also contributed significantly to job
dissatisfaction and burnout.
The study also found that 83.8 percent of the faculty members
surveyed said that learning new technologies took time away from
their research, with 71 percent
learning one or two new programs a year. Journalism professors "are
an active learning group," the study reported.
Higher-ranking faculty members were more likely to feel
technology-induced stress than were their junior counterparts; women
were also more likely than men
to feel tech stress.
Most faculty members agreed that they wanted and needed to learn more
about using technology, but they felt that "the training just isn't
sufficient," said
Christine Ogan, a professor of journalism at Indiana who was one of
the authors of the report. "They're getting more training than we
expected, but they still
say it's not enough for their needs."
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Will Davis
mailto:will.davis@ucdavis.edu
Teaching Resources Center (530) 752-6050
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University of California,Davis
Davis, CA 95616-8717
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