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if the profit margin that commercial publishers obtain from institutions that support the faculty in their research, and then, ironically, buy it back at exorbitant expense were revealed and better understood as a significant and unnecessary drain on our meager resources, higher education leaders might be able to use the opportunities that technology now offers to by-pass these publishers, perhaps manage our own scholarly publications and certainly avoid this extraordinary expense in the name of the common good that education offers society.

They are clearly intending to argue that ripping DVDs to put them online for a course involves defeating a technological protection measure (CSS, to be exact), and that is illegal under the DMCA and trumps any claim of fair use (even for libraries making preservation copies under section 108). If this goes to court, expect AIME to claim that UCLA violated the DMCA the second they moved content from a DVD to a hard drive.

let me say another word or two about our friend, the student who thinks he can read Romeo and Juliet in 10 minutes. It seems to me that he has a lot in common with educational policy makers who think that the experience of reading the book can be reduced to a small number of items on a standardized test. Both have an instrumental understanding of reading and learning which sees learning as a product and has not respect for the process of really engaging deeply with the literary experience. In many ways, the student's attitude is a byproduct of the current structure of education as much as it is a byproduct of the instant gratification promised by digital culture. As someone who has been involved in the last year with a project which seeks to model ways we can teach Moby-Dick in contemporary schools, I can tell you the resistance we've gotten from some teachers comes at both levels. Yes, some teachers don't think their students have the attention span to deal with a novel of this length and complexity but many more simply say that they don't think they have time to teach a novel of such richness if they are going to stay on track and review all of the content they are supposed to cover under the new national standards. Both push back against a depth of experience and the student may simply trying to act efficiently to give the teachers what they want on the test. As someone who loves literature, both sides of this equation break my heart.

what the gamers are doing in the Korean Bong is better described as intense concentration, entering a state of flow, rather than multitasking per se. A growing body of work has stressed the kinds of active problem solving which surrounds the play of certain kinds of games, the collaboration which occurs through certain forms of participatory culture, etc. as other ways of engaging with the online world. To me, there's something reductive about continuing to return to issues of multitasking when depicting Katie Salen's game school for example. Katie's approach is not about turning students lose on the computer; it is about teaching them to look at the world as a complex system and developing skills as designers. In my White Paper for MacArthur, I identify multitasking as a skill -- but I don't mean by this what young people think they are doing when they talk about multitasking. I mean the ability to manage attention -- sometimes concentrating on a single text or problem, sometimes scanning the environment to form a hazier understanding of the bigger picture, much as a driver needs to keep their eyes on the road in front of them but also needs to scan the rear view mirror. I think schools have a role to play in helping young people sharpen their understanding of which mode of engagement is appropriate for different tasks and contexts.

The goal shouldn't be to decide if computers are good or bad. Our goal should be to identify what a more constructive relationship to this technology might look like and to insure that those skills and practices get transmitted to a broader segment of the population.

"Podcasting does not contain any inherent value. It is only valuable inasmuch as it helps the instructor and students reach their educational goals, by facilitating thoughtful, engaging learning activities that are designed to work in support of those goals."

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

you have to think very hard about what to include and what can be left out.

essence

This has pretty exciting possibilities for Webinar/virtual classroom applications. The demo this morning was Skype. Until now, if you weren’t running Skype in the foreground on your iPhone, you couldn’t receive calls, and if you left the Skype app during a call, the call would disconnect. Now even when the phone is locked, you will still be able to receive Skype calls. When the phone is asleep or when the user is running other apps, VoIP apps can receive calls. When you send Skype to the background, incoming call invites will appear as the standard iPhone/iPod notification. Clicking the answer button brings the Skype app back. One question in the backchat during the presentation was whether there might be a new iPhone coming with a front-facing camera for such calls, but this went unanswered.

The new OS, in the background, will use cell towers to detect the phone’s location, in order to minimize power demands. The primary use of this service will be for turn-by-turn navigation. The secondary use will be to support social networking apps, such as Loopt. The OS has privacy protection for this service. An indicator on the status bar lets the user know when an app is using his or her location. The user can enable and disable location use by individual apps. This service could be useful for “location-based learning.”

Users can read books on any device (iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad). The books sync between devices, so that a user can stop reading a book on one device, then open it on another, and at the same place. This could be extremely handy for textbook use.

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.

Powell’s experiment, however, demonstrates the current limitations of Abilene Christian’s mobile learning study. Because the experiment took place on such a small scale, the margins of error were sometimes as high as 13 points, making it impossible to render statistically significant findings.

Although the university plans to saturate the 4,000-student campus with iPhones and iPod Touches by the fourth year of the study (giving them out to each incoming class), even then it will be difficult to extract good data, said Perkins, the lead researcher. “We could do this study for 10 years, and then maybe we could talk about statistical significance,” he said. “That’s just simply a function of the sample size.” In order to generate data that would comment widely on the uses and effectiveness of mobile technology on campuses, Perkins added, the study would have to partner with other institutions.

Since not all the students could necessarily afford AT&T service plans for their iPhones, and U.S. tax law would not permit the university to subsidize service plans for its students, Abilene Christian offered students the alternative of an iPod Touch — a device that shares many of the iPhone’s functions, but requires a wireless network to support Web-surfing.

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.

“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.

First and foremost, schools want our kids to be knowers, not learners. You can see that in nearly every aspect of our system, which remains content-driven both in pedagogy and assessment.

Arguably, if you have the skills to do it, you could literally build your own education by creating your own curriculum, your own classroom, and your own assessments.

Being able to design your own education, however, isn’t easy by any stretch. In fact, it’s a highly complex intellectual and emotional task.

But Mr. Steinhaus and other administrators soon realized that the iPad, with the slow finger-typing it requires, actually makes written course work more difficult, and that the devices wouldn't run all of the university's applications.

When the University of Notre Dame tested iPads in a management class, students said the finger-based interface on its glassy surface was not good for taking class notes and didn't allow them to mark up readings. For their online final exam, 39 of the 40 students put away their iPads in favor a laptop, because of concerns that the Apple tablet might not save their material.

iPads also foster collaboration. Students using them for group assignments in a math class at Pepperdine University were more in sync than were students in a section not using iPads. The iPad-equipped students worked at the same pace as one another and shared their screens to help one another solve tough problems, says Dana Hoover, assistant chief information officer for communications and planning.

Harvard has invested heavily in a system of residential housing and high-quality tutoring.  This means that even students who pay the tuition sticker price aren’t covering the full cost of their education.  Thus, growing the size of its “customer” base, which is how businesses achieve scale economies and greater profitability, is financially problematic for Harvard and for other universities with similar operating models. 

What is the purpose of a university as depicted in this book? Is it: A. A university is an institution that provides a degree, which is a credential or screening device for the economy and for society? Or B.  A university is an institution in which people acquire the knowledge they need for a particular job? Or C.  A university is an institution in which people acquire the knowledge they need to be a citizen? Or D.  A university is an experience where you acquire a capacity to be a lifelong learner (because most of the knowledge you acquire will be obsolete within a few years and the jobs of tomorrow will not be the jobs of today)? Or E. Something else?

One of the best ways to learn to learn is to be an active learner and a teacher of one’s fellow students in college. This instructional philosophy isn’t yet widespread, but its effectiveness has been proven, and it doesn’t require additional financial investment, only a change in the attitudes of faculty members and students.  Broader adoption seems likely, with time.

Imagine the cultural understandings that could develop between readers from opposite sides of the earth sharing thought together.