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The movement toward open content reflects a growing shift in the way academics in many parts of the world are conceptualizing education to a view that is more about the process of learning than the information conveyed in their courses. Information is everywhere; the challenge is to make effective use of it.

As customizable educational content is made increasingly available for free over the Internet, students are learning not only the material, but also skills related to finding, evaluating, interpreting, and repurposing the resources they are studying in partnership with their teachers.

collective knowledge and the sharing and reuse of learning and scholarly content,

Readers of electronic books may be reading more, as well. Kindle owners, according to Amazon, buy three times as many books as they did before they had Kindles; Sony reports that Reader owners download about eight books per month ⎯ as compared to fewer than seven books per year purchased by the average American book buyer in 2008, according to a New York Times article.

The convenience of having an entire library of books, magazines, and newspapers — each remembering exactly where you left off the last time you looked at them — and all in a single, small device is one of the most compelling aspects driving electronic reader sales.

a larger format version of the device expressly built for academic texts, newspapers, and journals, is being piloted at Arizona State University, Ball State University, Case Western Reserve University, Pace University, Princeton, Reed College, Syracuse University, and the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. Northwest Missouri State University and Penn State have embarked on pilots using the Sony Reader. Johns Hopkins is piloting the enTourage eDGe, which combines the functions of an e-reader, a netbook, a notepad, and an audio/video recorder and player in one handheld device.

In a 2007 report, the American Association of Colleges and Universities recommended strongly that emerging technologies be employed by students in order for them to gain experience in “research, experimentation, problem-based learning, and other forms of creative work,” particularly in their chosen fields of study.

New scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly and far too often lag behind. Citation-based metrics, to pick one example, are hard to apply to research based in social media. New forms of peer review and approval, such as reader ratings, inclusion in and mention by influential blogs, tagging, incoming links, and retweeting, are arising from the natural actions of the global community of educators, with increasingly relevant and interesting results. These forms of scholarly corroboration are not yet well understood by mainstream faculty and academic decision makers, creating a gap between what is possible and what is acceptable.

despite the widespread agreement on its importance, training in digital literacy skills and techniques is rare in teacher education programs. In higher education, formal training is virtually non-existent.

these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

My experience in creating podcasts came through much nobler endeavors. It began with a research project in the working-class neighborhoods of North Belfast and a frustrated conversation over pints in a pub. I was on a research high after an interview with two women of very different political backgrounds. They were friends, brought together by the work of a local nonprofit, and their mutual admiration shone from the lightning-fast banter that they tossed back and forth throughout the interview. It was clear to me that they were a perfect example of a friendship from different sides of the political divide. But my friend at the pub just couldn't get it. He suggested that their friendship might be contrived, a mere show for my benefit, or that if real, it didn't mean as much as I thought. Exasperated, I pulled out my recorder and played the conversation back to him. As their Belfast accents filled up our corner booth, I could see his posture slacken and the battle turn my way. In that moment, I decided that only a podcast could finish telling my story. Over the next months, armed with just an MP3 player and some freeware suggested by a friend, I worked to piece together the story of North Belfast through interviews, conversations, and the sounds of the streets. The result was crude, elementary, and slightly difficult to listen to. But I was hooked.

Student Use (and Misuse) of Podcast Technology

In fact, the iPod topped the list of the most "in" things on campus in 2006, according to Student Monitor's Lifestyle & Media Study.

PRINCIPLES

EMPLOYING COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL IN MEDIA LITERACY LESSONS

Common instructional activities include comparison-contrast analysis, deconstruction (close analysis) of the form and content of a message, illustration of key points, and examination of the historical, economic, political, or social contexts in which a particular message was produced and is received.

Net Gen students are facile at multitasking

Workers anticipated having a single profession for the duration of their working lives. Education was based on a factory-like, "one size fits all" model. Talent was developed by weeding out those who could not do well in a monochromatic learning environment.

Knowing now means using a well-organized set of facts to find new information and to solve novel problems. In 1900, learning consisted largely of memorization; today it relies chiefly on understanding.

Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the U.S. Geological Survey’s Twitter Earthquake Detector (@USGSTed) is a prototype that gathers real-time Twitter updates during seismic activities faster than scientific equipment can be tapped for more precise measurements and alerts. It examines earthquakes at an anecdotal level, and complements scientific analysis, according to the project’s overseer, Paul Earle.

At the most basic level, social media is about community building. Government agencies have adopted this mindset to varying degrees as a way to foster trust and dialogue with people. “It is truly a national town hall that has never been attempted during a disaster,” said Commander James Hoeft of the U.S. Navy, who oversees the cleanup effort’s social media team.

It's a darn shame, in my opinion, that the AAAS doesn't put videos of these symposiums on the web, along the lines of TED lectures and the like.  If they did that, I feel that many of the presentations would deserve (and get) tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of views. I've made this suggestion to several people within AAAS, but since the cultural conservatism of American intellectuals is perhaps rivaled only by that of the Saudi religious authorities, I suspect that a few decades will pass before any such thing happens.

The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. “Real names” policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people. T

what many folks failed to notice is that countless black and Latino youth signed up to Facebook using handles. Most people don’t notice what black and Latino youth do online. Likewise, people from outside of the US started signing up to Facebook and using alternate names. Again, no one noticed because names transliterated from Arabic or Malaysian or containing phrases in Portuguese weren’t particularly visible to the real name enforcers. Real names are by no means universal on Facebook, but it’s the importance of real names is a myth that Facebook likes to shill out. And, for the most part, privileged white Americans use their real name on Facebook. So it “looks” right.

privileged people

The scholarship of teaching, in particular, has been overlooked for too long.

They serve as conservators and promulgators of our cultural memories

The value of what happens on a campus is hard to quantify, but it can be life-changing. That's true for most of us who have chosen to work in higher education, as it is for many former students who pursued work in "the real world."

The team found that students remembered the pairs much better when they first tried to retrieve the answer before it was shown to them. In a way this pretesting effect is counterintuitive:

Students were asked to read the essay and prepare for a test on it. However, in the pretest condition they were asked questions about the passage before reading it such as “What is total color blindness caused by brain damage called?” Asking these kinds of question before reading the passage obviously focuses students’ attention on the critical concepts. To control this “direction of attention” issue, in the control condition students were either given additional time to study, or the researchers focused their attention on the critical passages in one of several ways: by italicizing the critical section, by bolding the key term that would be tested, or by a combination of strategies. However, in all the experiments they found an advantage in having students first guess the answers. The effect was about the same magnitude, around 10 percent, as in the previous set of experiments.

This work has implications beyond the classroom. By challenging ourselves to retrieve or generate answers we can improve our recall. Keep that in mind next time you turn to Google for an answer, and give yourself a little more time to come up with the answer on your own.