Instructional & Media Services at Dickinson College

The Google Wave chatting tool is too complicated for its own good.

Chatting on Wave is like talking to an overcurious mind reader.

This behavior is so corrosive to normal conversation that you'd think it was some kind of bug. In fact, it's a feature—indeed, it's one of the Wave team's proudest accomplishments.

Abilene Christian University says handing out iPhones to its entire first-year class in 2008 has improved interaction between students and faculty members.

Does positive feeling mean better teaching and learning? Mr. Schubert adds that it's too early to collect enough data to understand how giving out iPhones improves education. Student testimonials in the report, however, highlight easier access to professors. One savvy student says having an iPhone means he's less confused in class.

"My professor will ask a question about something and I don't know what it is, but right here on my phone, with just one touch, I have Dictionary.com, I have a Wikipedia app—I can look it up," said Tyler Sutphen, a marketing major. "I know what they're talking about, because it's right there."

According to Gloucestershire College, in England, Facebook and other social-networking Web sites can do more than provide a platform for vacation photos, favorite quotes, and status updates; they can help reduce dropout rates, the BBC reports.

The media-curriculum manager at the college, Perry Perrott, says that with the advent of social media, students have been better at keeping in touch with faculty members, which has lead to a “significant improvement in retention.”

After seeing how popular social-networking sites were with students, Mr. Perry says the college decided to embrace the technology as a cost-free way to further engage the campus.

I grab feeds from external blogs all the time that are related to UMW an pull them into our sitewide “tags” blog (the name tags here is confusing, it is simply a republishing of everything in the entire WPMu install) with FeedWordPress. For example, I stumbled across this post in the tags blog on UMW Blogs tonight, which was actually being pulled in from a WordPress.com blog of a student who graduated years ago, but regularly blogs about her work in historic preservation.  This particular post was all about a book she read as an undergraduate in Historic Preservation, and how great a resource it is.  A valuable post, especially since the professor who recommended that book, W. Brown Morton, retired last year. There is a kind of eternal echo in a system like this that students, faculty, and staff can continue to feed into a community of teaching and learning well beyond their matriculation period, or even their career.

what we are doing as instructional technologists, scholars and students in higher ed right now is much bigger than a particular blogging system or software, I see my job as working with people to imagine the implications and possibilities of managing and maintaining their digital identity in a moment when we are truly in a deep transformation of information, identity, and scholarship.

we’ll host domains that professors purchase and, ideally, map all their domains onto one WP install that can manage many multi-blogging solutions from one install.  The whole Russian Doll thing that WPMu can do with the Multi-Site Manager plugin. So you offer a Bluehost like setup for faculty, and if that is too much, allow them to map a domain, take control of their own course work, and encourage an aggregated course management model that pushes students to take control of their digital identity and spaces by extension.  Giving students a space and voice on your domain or application is not the same as asking them to create, manage and maintain their own space.  Moreover, it doesn’t feed into the idea of a digital trajectory that starts well before they come to college and will end well after they leave.  This model extends the community, and brings in key resources like a recent graduate discussing an out-of-print historic preservation text book a retired professor assigned to be one of the best resources for an aspiring Preservation graduate student. This is what it is all about, right there, and it’s not gonna happen in silos and on someone else’s space, we need to provision, empower, and imagine the merge as a full powered move to many. many domains of one’s own.

a site that wants to look at the intersection of productivity, technology, and pedagogy in higher education

showing that the barrier of entry to this new stuff is lower than it seems

One hundred percent of this stuff we bring into our own classroom. If the slogan for software development is to eat your own dog food, we are always eating our own dog food. These are our assignments, our best practices.

the noise is worse than ever. Indeed, it is being magnified every day as more people pile onto Twitter and Facebook and new apps yet to crest like Google Wave. The data stream is growing stronger, but so too is the danger of drowning in all that information.

the fact that Seesmic or TweetDeck or any of these apps can display 1,200 Tweets at once is not a feature, it’s a bug

if you think Twitter is noisy, wait until you see Google Wave, which doesn’t hide anything at all.  Imagine that Twhirl image below with a million dialog boxes on your screen, except you see as other people type in their messages and add new files and images to the conversation, all at once as it is happening.  It’s enough to make your brain explode.