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With the growing need and ability to be portable comes tremendous opportunity for content providers. But it also requires substantial changes to their thinking and their systems. It requires distribution platforms, API’s and other ways to get the content to where it needs to be. But having an API is not enough. In order for content providers to take full advantage of these new platforms, they will need to, first and foremost, embrace one simple philosophy: COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere).

COPE is really a combination of several other closely related sub-philosophies, including: Build content management systems (CMS), not web publishing tools (WPT) Separate content from display Ensure content modularity Ensure content portability

But to truly separate content from display, the content repository needs to also avoid storing “dirty” content. Dirty content is content that contains any presentation layer information embedded in it, including HTML, XML, character encodings, microformats, and any other markup or rich formatting information. This separation is achieved by the two other principles, content modularity and content portability

I propose a THATCamp session in which we think about ways to hack campus space. And I mean hack in the most generous sense of the term. How can we use these spaces in ways they weren’t designed for? How can we turn their flaws—bolted down desks, windowless rooms, tiered seating, and so on—into advantages (or at least neutralize them)? How can we turn institutional places into dwelling spaces that we inhabit and habituate? I was initially thinking mostly of classrooms—because I have taught in dreadfully designed rooms—but I’d extend this idea to include all campus spaces. And I’d like our hacks to go beyond the simply practical (though we need those too) to include what amounts to philosophical and ideological hacks.

What would a temporary autonomous zone look like on campus? …in the student union? …in your classroom? How can we change attitudes about what can or can’t be done in certain spaces? What’s the most surprising thing we can do with a campus space, and conversely, what’s the most predictable thing we can do in a new way?

In large part, the problem is that graduate students pursuing their doctorates get little or no training in how students learn. When these graduate students become faculty members, he said, they might think about the content they want students to learn, but not the cognitive capabilities they want them to develop.

Such approaches would demand much more of students and faculty. Students should be made to grapple with the material and receive authentic and explicit practice in thinking like an expert, Mr. Wieman said. Faculty would need to provide timely and specific feedback, and move beyond lectures in which students can sit passively receiving information.

Higher education once was immune, he said, until the spread of online learning, which will allow lower-cost providers to extend into the higher reaches of the marketplace. "Higher education," he said, "is vulnerable to disruption." And, while students are changing, several speakers described conventional teaching approaches as being ineffective.

Peer evaluation:  You must do your assignments satisfactorily to fulfill your contract.   Each week, two or three students will work as a peer group in charge of leading our joint education for two or three classes.  During that unit, the peer leaders will assign readings as well as writing or multimedia assignments--and they will be charged with determining if each student has satisfactorily completed the assignment.   They will be charged with providing written feedback on all assignments.  Their goal will be to ensure that each student satisfactorily completes the assignment and they will work with each student to make sure they succeed.

How to Crowdsource Grading, I described this method: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/how-crowdsource-grading

SYLLABUS We will be co-creating a syllabus in this course.  Professor Davidson will begin, there will be several special guests or other events, but the remainder of the course content will be assigned by peer-leaders charged with offering a challenging, creative, informative, inspiring, participatory educational experience (No Talking Heads Please!) for the class.   Peer-led classes might that involve reading/seeing/listening to/experiencing imaginative works (including scientific papers,) attending lectures, visiting art museums and going to concerts together, or visiting businesses and community organizations to understand how these literacies are changing.  I will get us started with some readings and a museum visit and a collaborative public wiki-based writing assignment.   We have a number of exciting visitors coming this term.   The rest of the syllabus will be filled out by the peer leaders and will evolve over the course.

One of their assignments is to interview a researcher in their field. This year, since the students had a nice mix of majors from across the curriculum, we used reports from the interviews as an opportunity to analyze on how research traditions vary from one discipline to another and how these experts’ processes differ from those of non-experts.

One thing that many students remarked on as they reported on their interviews: the activities that define research are enormously varied from one discipline to another. The process a researcher goes through to examine the historical context in which Shakespeare wrote one of his history plays is a world apart from what a researcher does to develop a new vaccine or what an ethnographer does when studying an isolated culture in Brazil.

The scientists all had co-authors; the social scientists were a mix of solo and collaborative projects, and the humanists all performed solo acts. And yet, it became clear that all of them were working within an ongoing conversation. None of them was doing work that didn’t draw on and respond to the work of others.

But the benefits of having iPads in the classroom don't come free. Teachers say you have to invest time into the technology in order to get something out of it, which means much of the iPad's usefulness will depend on the applications both teachers and publishers discover as adoption grows.

Four Ways Technology Will Change Our Lives In The Future Technology experts Mike McSherry, CEO of Swype, and Bill Buxton make their predictions for where technology will go next.

1. Gesture Technology

According to Babson Survey Research Group, 65 percent of all reporting higher education institutions said that online learning was a critical part of their long-term strategy, and over 6.1 million students took at least one online course during the fall 2010 term—an increase of 560,000 students over the previous year.

A post-LMS world does not suggest that the LMS is obsolete but, rather, that the practice of evaluating learning outcomes through a traditional LMS as the sole means for knowledge acquisition is obsolete. The original design of the LMS was transactional and largely administrative in nature, hence the “M” in “LMS.” The function of the traditional LMS is to simplify how learning is scheduled, deployed, and tracked as a means to organize curricula and manage learning materials.

LMS 3.0 design focuses on four essential applications: learning grids; e-learning intelligence; content clouds; and open architecture.

So Prensky was right the first time – there really is digital native generation? No, certainly not – and that’s what’s important about this study. It shows that while those differences exist, they are not lined up on each side of any kind of well-defined discontinuity. The change is gradual, age group to age group. The researchers regard their results as confirming those who have doubted the existence of a coherent ‘net generation’.

What the reseachers do find interesting and worthy of further study is the correlation – which is independent of age -- between attitudes to technology and approaches to studying. In short, students who more readily use technology for their studies are more likely than others to be deeply engaged with their work. “Those students who had more positive attitudes to technology were more likely to adopt a deep approach to studying, more likely to adopt a strategic approach to studying and less likely to adopt a surface approach to studying.”