The first academic year of our new College has drawn to a close, and we are already planning and anticipating the coming year! In May, just a couple of weeks before our joyful and memorable commencement celebrations, we came together as a College to begin outlining the last two of the three “neighborhoods” that will be guiding our enterprise into the future. This meeting and its predecessors were collectively the most energizing, exciting, and productive experiences I’ve had during my first months in Minnesota.

As I mentioned in my last message in Connect!, the neighborhood concept is designed to serve as our organizing and mobilizing strategy for living into our mission. Forming the neighborhoods requires that each of us stretch beyond our own personal research, teaching, and service talents to actively engage with colleagues whose work expands our knowledge and deepens our understanding. Through this process, we will surface comprehensive approaches critical to addressing the complex issues facing our world.

During the past year, faculty and staff met three times in highly productive retreats to develop the concept of the first of our neighborhoods, “Teaching and Learning.” Then, although the academic year was drawing to a close, we felt an urgency to come together to lay the groundwork for the other two neighborhoods: “Psychological, Physical, and Social Development,” and “Family, Organization, and Community Systems and Contexts.”

Despite the competition of attention from final exams, papers, and dissertation hearings, this last neighborhood retreat brought 150 of us together for an entire morning. Almost immediately the room was abuzz with the excitement that comes from the active exchange of questions and ideas about possibilities: how to become more familiar with one another’s work across our nine departments and four collegewide centers; how to define the societal dilemmas that could use our many talents; and how each of us could locate ourselves within the neighborhood structure. As these and other possibilities evolve into realities, Connect! will keep you up to date on “the news around the neighborhoods.”

Meanwhile, as we thrive and grow as a new college, we will continue to take a leadership role by generating innovations in a variety of areas to redesign, then model the ways that higher education can best serve the world. This issue of Connect! focuses on one of those areas—how we can harness technology to most effectively and meaningfully educate our students and create new applications for research.

Within our College, we have faculty members who are researching the use of podcasts, wikis, and blogs (to name just a few systems that didn’t even exist ten years ago!) to facilitate access to and learning in higher education. Other faculty are exploring how technology can provide new instructional pathways in the K-12 school systems. Our College is proud to be leading the way in the state and across the country for many of these applications.

Technology will also play an important role in our neighborhoods, providing the infrastructure for sharing our many disciplines’ critical experimental and applied research, teaching, and service discoveries. Additionally, technology will enable us to broaden the reach of knowledge exchange across the University and throughout the world outside of our walls.

As you read the last issue of Connect! for our first academic year, I hope you learn much and remain as excited as I am about being part of a college that is destined to positively transform the future for, as stated in our mission, “children, youth, and adults across the lifespan in families, organizations, and communities,” near and far.

Have a great summer, and we’ll see you in the fall!

Darlyne Bailey, dean and assistant to the president
Campbell Leadership Chair in Education and Human Development