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Wednesday, March 19. 2008
“We see our face-to-face interaction going down and our online attendance skyrocketing up,” Mr. Dunker says. Robert E. Dunker, the president of Western Iowa Tech Community College, joins Warren Arbogast and Scott Carlson on Tech Therapy this week to talk about why presidents should pay attention to technology. The short answer: to keep the college doors open. “We see our face-to-face interaction going down and our online attendance skyrocketing up,” Mr. Dunker says. “As presidents, if we don’t pay attention to IT and the impact IT has on our institutions, we are going to be dead in the water.”
Wednesday, March 12. 2008
With all the information on the Internet, and with all the ways that students can connect with experts via Web 2.0 tools, who needs traditional courses? George Siemens, an education-technology consultant, argues that the day may soon come when the course outlives its usefulness. “When content and conversations are distributed, we no longer need to have courses in their current iteration,” he says in a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation on his Web site. “We can instead create a global classroom with distributed learners from virtually every corner of the world participating in learning experiences, providing learning resources, creating learning resources, and playing a peer-mentoring role to others through the process.” It’s a provocative point, but he offers no clear path to that future. And he concedes that some form of accreditation would be needed to give a seal of approval to all that distributed, self-guided learning. That’s a caveat as big as Harvard’s main library. The argument seems a bit like the pronouncements that come, from time to time, predicting the death of the book. It is a fun thought exercise, even if the book never does die. —Jeffrey R. Young
Friday, February 29. 2008
Audio: Google Sees College Audience as Ideal Focus Group for Its Products Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and user experience at Google, talks about the company's efforts to get colleges to adopt its e-mail service and responds to critics of the company's partnership with college libraries.
Friday, February 29. 2008
Chronicle of Higher Education Multimedia David Parry, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, talks about using Twitter, a new messaging service, for his courses.
Friday, February 29. 2008
From Today's Chronicle of Higher Education Anyone who feels overloaded with information from e-mail, blogs, and Web sites probably won't want to read this. But some professors, librarians, and administrators have begun using Twitter, a service that can blast very short notes (up to 140 characters) to select users' cellphones or computer screens. The practice is often called microblogging because people use it to send out pithy updates about their daily lives. ......Twitter lets you send a text message from your cellphone to a set list of contacts, called followers, who can set the system to receive messages via their cellphones, their instant-message software, or a Web-based program.
Monday, February 25. 2008
February 25, 2008 Chronicle of Higher EducationProject Aims to Build Online Classroom With Latest Web 2.0 FeaturesHoward Rheingold was one of the first popular authors to write about the promises of online social networks, starting with his 1993 book, The Virtual Community. Now he’s bringing the latest online-community tools — wikis, videos, blogs, and the like — to the college classroom. And what better way to encourage professors to use online community tools than to create an online community where professors can talk about the topic? That’s what Mr. Rheingold plans to do, along with putting together a set of how-to guides to help other professors use social-media tools, which are sometimes referred to collectively as “Web 2.0.” The project is called the Social Media Virtual Classroom, and last week it won a $61,000 grant in the Digital Media and Learning Competition. The competition was sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, otherwise known as HASTAC. Mr. Rheingold said in an interview that students need to be exposed to “participatory media” in order to become active citizens, since he believes that political activism has increasingly moved online. “In the 21st century, civic education is participatory media literacy education,” he said. “The feeling of a citizen who only passively consumes what’s sold to them by broadcast media is very different from someone who has posted a blog item or who has posted a YouTube post, or who has commented on a newspaper article online.” Other projects that won the digital-learning competition include an effort to use laptop computers as musical instruments and an online community for professors working on virtual worlds like Second Life. —Jeffrey R. Young
Monday, February 25. 2008
Borrowing a page from the popular video-sharing site YouTube, a new online service lets people upload and share their papers or entire books via a social-network interface. But will a format that works for videos translate to documents? It's called iPaper, and it uses a Flash-based document reader that can be embedded into a Web page. The experience of reading neatly formatted text inside a fixed box feels a bit like using an old microfilm reader, except that you can search the documents or e-mail them to friends. The company behind the technology, Scribd, also offers a library of iPaper documents and invites users to set up an account to post their own written works. And, just like on YouTube, users can comment about each document, give it a rating, and view related works.
Tuesday, February 19. 2008
Last Thursday Talking of Teaching Is your teaching technique a little rusty? Your classroom routine a tad tired? In a Brown Bag discussion on Thursday, Barbara Gross Davis, author of "Tools for Teaching" and a top undergraduate-education official at the University of California at Berkeley, took questions from readers at community colleges and four-year universities, in the United States and abroad. You can read the transcript online.
Monday, February 18. 2008
Applied Cognitive Science Harvard cognitive scientist Stephen M. Kosslyn, who studies how brains process images, wants to improve the world with his cutting-edge research. And he's starting with four ways to make your PowerPoint presentations more human brain-compliant. This morning at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston, Kosslyn spoke in a symposium devoted the visualization of data, explaining how breakthroughs in cognitive science have revealed the best way to present information in the PowerPoint format. It was one of the most interesting examples of applied science I've ever seen.
Thursday, February 14. 2008
From Educause Quarterly, Volume 31, Number 1, 2008 © 2008 R. Martin Reardon. The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).EDUCAUSE Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 1 (January–March 2008), pp. 4–5Leveraging a faculty learning community has helped me do things I didn't know how to do with technology, including podcasting my lectures
Thursday, February 14. 2008
What: NATIONAL WEBCAST DISCUSSION When: Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Time: 1:00 - 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time Where: Room 0303 GITC @ NJIT The Partners: The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; The American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC); The National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC); Sloan-C and Cooperating Universities THE STRATEGIC CASE FOR ONLINE LEARNING: ACCESS, ENGAGEMENT AND SUCCESSBeginning in 2007, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation made possible a national initiative focused on the strategic importance of online learning and distance education in higher education. This live national videoconference coming from Washington State University is an opportunity for individuals (at their computers) and in groups participating locally together to: - interact with university presidents and other national leaders involved in the NASULGC/SLOAN National Online Learning Commission;
- experience real case examples from universities where online learning, distance education and rapid internet interaction made a difference (time to graduation, business and financial strength, disaster recovery, mentoring, etc.);
- see how some universities are incorporating this strategic asset in their master plans;
- discuss and raise questions about what works, what doesn't and what leadership in this area requires for the future.
Opportunities for pre-conference interaction, local group discussion formation and online learning resources will be made available shortly. The American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC) is collaborating with Washington State University and Oregon State University in producing the event. The NASULGC Commission, Sloan-C, The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, The Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, Colorado State University, the Southern Educational Regional Education Board (SREB) and others are participating in marketing, case study development and program planning. TARGET AUDIENCE: Presidents, Chancellors, Provosts, Vice-Presidents and Deans for Engagement and Distance Education, Program Directors, Faculty and Learners interested in developing quality online learning programs with breadth and scale. ULTIMATE GOAL: Access to quality, affordable higher education to all wishing to learn. HOW TO PARTICIPATE: send an e-mail to instruction@njit.edu
Tuesday, February 12. 2008
"The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium (NMC)’s Horizon Project, a five- year qualitative research effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations. The 2008 Horizon Report, the fifth in this annual series, is produced as a collaboration between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE program." Here is a listing of the technologies identified from 2004 - 2007 (see below for this years identified technologies) 2004:Learniing ObjectsScalable Vector GraphicsRapid PrototypingMultimodal InterfacesContext-Aware ComputingKnowledge Webs2005: Extended LearningUbiquitous WirelessInetelligent SearchingEducational GamingSocial Networks and Knowledge Webs (again)Context Aware Computing/Augmented Reality (again)2006:Social ComputingEducational GamingAugemented Reality and Enhanced VisualizationContext-Aware Environments and Devices2007:User-Created ContentSocial NetworkingMobile PhonesVirtual WorldsThe New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication (See NY Times article on Harvard today)Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming Does anyone see a pattern here?
Tuesday, February 12. 2008
From thday's New York Times.. Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free. Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.
Friday, February 8. 2008
From Today's Chronicle of Higher Education... Nicholas Carr Was Right? IBM's Project Kittyhawk Unifies the InternetIBM essentially wants to be able to use Blue Gene supercomputing technology to build a uniform, universal, and global infrastructure capable of housing the entire Internet, as opposed to the disparate clusters of computers companies rely on now. The white paper, uncovered by The Register, a Britain-based technology Web site, describes the project as an earnest attempt to build a “global-scale shared computer capable of hosting the entire Internet as an application.” Nicholas Carr, a notorious writer in the technology world for his brazen views about the future of the IT industry, writes about an IBM white paper describing Project Kittyhawk. That could hold up Mr. Carr’s thesis in his book, The Big Switch, that information technology will eventually become a public utility. That’s all speculation, however — it still leaves the question of who’s manning the cord after the “Monolothic Internet” is complete. —Hurley Goodall
Thursday, February 7. 2008
Today (January 30, 2008) the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) released the 2008 Horizon Report at the ELI Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas. The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the NMC’s Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education. The fifth edition in this annual series is again a collaboration between NMC and ELI. download the 2008 Horizon Report (256k PDF). More on all of this to follow
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Doing What I Don’t Know How to Do Posted by Bill Reynolds
in Educause at
11:45
At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish ... Posted by Bill Reynolds
in From the New York Times at
09:38
