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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.

Bloom identified six cognitive levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, with sophistication growing from basic knowledge-recall skills to the highest level, evaluation.

Originally developed as a method of classifying educational goals for student performance evaluation,

three major domains of learning: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor

My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery.

The use of writing for disinterested purposes, and as a source of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, is a secondary result, and more often than not it may even be turned into a means of strengthening, justifying or concealing the other. (p. 299)

Already our ideas about privacy are radically different than they were a decade ago.

reading for learning is not the same activity as reading for pleasure, and so the question must be asked: Do these devices designed for the consumer book market match up against the rigors of academic reading?

Each school ran its pilot in courses that used texts without color graphs or complex illustrations, so that the known limitations of the devices’ E Ink grayscale electronic-paper display wouldn’t be a hindrance in the students’ learning.

There were qualities of both the Kindle DX and Sony Reader that the students felt showed promise, and that made them enthusiastic for the day when e-readers’ functionality as an academic tool becomes a reality. These features include the easy-to-read E Ink screen; the size, weight, and durability of the devices; and the long battery life. But students encountered limitations in the devices that made them inadequate for reading academic texts.

M.I.T. officials like to tell about an unsolicited comment they received one day about the online course “Introduction to Solid State Chemistry.” “I learned a LOT from these lectures and the other course material,” the comment said. “Thank you for having it online.” The officials did a double take. It was from Bill Gates. (Really.)

But just 9 percent of those who use M.I.T. OpenCourseWare are educators. Forty-two percent are students enrolled at other institutions, while another 43 percent are independent learners like Mr. Gates. Yale, which began putting free courses online just four years ago, is seeing similar proportions: 25 percent are students, a majority of them enrolled at Yale or prospective students; just 6 percent are educators; and 69 percent are independent learners.

Professor Shankar is working on his second semester of recorded videos, and says that the experience has improved his teaching.

what they had learned in school did not prepare them to face the problems of life, think clearly, be creative, or fulfill their civic duties.

So to give high schools the freedom to try new ways of schooling in a democracy, a small band of reformers convinced the best universities to waive their admission requirements and accept graduates from high schools that designed new programs.

Between 1933-1941, thirty high schools in the country and over 300 universities and colleges joined the experiment sponsored by the Progressive Education Association.

the Obama administration's educational policy under the leadership of Arne Duncan lacks a democratic vision and sense of moral direction

Almost all of Duncan's polices are indebted to the codes of a market-driven business culture, legitimated through discourses of measurement, efficiency and utility. This is a discourse that values hedge fund managers over teachers, privatization over the public good, management over leadership and training over education. Duncan's fervent support of neoliberal values are well-known and are evident in his support for high-stakes testing, charter schools, school-business alliances, merit pay, linking teacher pay to higher test scores, offering students monetary rewards for higher grades, CEO-type management, abolishing tenure, defining the purpose of schooling as largely job training, the weakening of teacher unions and blaming teachers exclusively for the failure of public schooling.[4]

Duncan has expanded the reach of his educational reform policies and is now attempting to rewrite curricular mandates. Emphasizing the practical and experiential, he seeks to gut the critical nature of theory, pedagogy and knowledge taught in colleges of education. This is an important issue to more than just teachers who are denied a voice in curricular development; it also affects whole generations of youth. Such a bold initiative reveals in very clear terms the political project that drives his reforms and what he fears about both public schooling and the teachers who labor in classrooms every day.

“If you take a class, in our case, you’re very likely to meet 20 students from 20 countries,” Reshef says about University of the People. “We believe, by the way, that being exposed to 20 people from 20 cultures — the way they think, the way they function in the class — is as important, if not more, than the subject area itself.”

“We re-teach the same concepts again and again,” he said. “The teacher has no sense of who in his classroom is getting it, not getting it…and when you look at all of the successful innovations, it’s where you let the student assess his knowledge, understand where they are, and proceed at a pace where they’re actually seeing that they know something before they move on.”The Department of Education’s meta-analysis, which focused on older learners, supports this. Online learners who self-monitored understanding — by, for example, deciding when to move on to the next lesson — performed better.

The modest difference in performance between online and physical classroom learners in the meta-analysis, for instance, was larger for those students who learned through a blend of online and physical classroom conditions.

A focus of ACTFL 2011 will be on how language educators can prepare students for living, working, and learning in a global environment.

While technology is embedded in all 21st century classroom activities, this strand focuses on specific cutting edge technologies that promote language development and cultural understanding including social networking and global communities.

Building the language capacity of the U.S. is an ongoing challenge that requires effective policies, local and national advocacy efforts, and matching U.S. student performance against international benchmarks. Developing effective teachers and effective teacher leaders and mentors is also a critical component of our profession.

Some adventurous professors have used Twitter as a teaching tool for at least a few years. At a presentation at Educause in 2009, W. Gardner Campbell, director of the academy of teaching and learning at Baylor University, extolled the virtues of allowing students to pose questions to the professor and each other — an important part of the thinking and learning process — without having to raise their hands to do so immediately and aloud. And in November, a group of professors published a scientific paper suggesting that bringing Twitter into the learning process might boost student engagement and performance.

But while Lomicka and her tech-forward peers are not advocating that every college go the way of Chapel Hill, they are finding out that some relatively novel teaching technologies that are used by academics of all stripes, such as Twitter and iTunes U, are particularly useful for teaching languages.

At Emory University, language instructional content is far and away the biggest export of its public repository on iTunes U, where visitors from around the world have downloaded more than 10 million files since Emory opened the site in 2007.

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

Much of the technology for the classroom of the "future" actually exists now. The difference in the future will be that it will be much more common and used as a matter of course.

Connectivity and "embeddedness" will be the guiding principles: connectivity, in the sense that whatever device pupils do their work on will not lead to a cul-de-sac: it will be straightforward to start work on a handheld computer in one place and continue on a laptop somewhere else; embeddedness, in the sense that you won't have to think about what you're using, because it will all be part of the fabric of living. These two ideas are, of course, closely related.

Teachers will continue to be the single most important element in the learning process.

He saw students pouring energy into memorizing bits of information that he knew they’d later forget. So he structured the rest of the syllabus around creating the simulation. Now he gets rid of about 40 percent of the rules of the game each semester so that students have to come up with new rules to determine how the interactions will play out. “The most learning happens there,” he says.

World Sim materials go up on a class “wiki,” a collection of Web pages that professor and students edit. Building new-media literacy is one of Wesch’s goals. Very few students arrive at his class knowing how to use digital tools such as wikis.

“There’s nothing more important than loving your students,” Wesch says, his office full of props from the simulation. “Before I lecture I start getting nervous ... so I meditate on this idea of ‘Love your students.’“It completely displaces all of that anxiety, because you recognize, it’s not about me, it’s about them.”