Skip to main content

Home/ beyondwebct/ Group items tagged university

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Barbara Lindsey

The iPad and Information's Third Age | Open Culture - 1 views

  • Though the university initially fought its introduction, the printed textbook provided broad access to information that, for the first time, promised the possibility of universal education.
  • A barrier of symbolic complexity emerged between people and information for one of the first times in history. And the superabundance of information created a world that by necessity had to be divided into smaller and smaller subsections for organizational reasons. As people began to feel increasingly disconnected from information and as its relational and contextual aspects began to fade, we saw a transformation in teaching and learning. Hands-on apprenticeships and small teacher/student cohorts began to disappear, replaced by teachers delivering carefully parsed and categorized information to “standardized” students, all while trapped in classrooms isolated from the world in order to limit “distraction.”
  • It has become virtually impossible for a person to assess the quality, relevance, and usefulness of more information than she can process in a lifetime. And this is a problem that will only get worse as information continues to proliferate. But a quick look at popular technologies shows some of the ways people are working to address it. Social networking leverages selected communities to recommend books, restaurants, and movies. Context- and location-aware applications help focus search results and eliminate extraneous complexity. And customization and personalization allow people to create informational spaces that limit the intrusion of informational chaos.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Any genuine solution will have to address the problems of the current informational age — and it will need to continue answering the problems of the previous informational ages. From what I’ve seen, Apple’s new iPad is the first device to promise this (even if that promise isn’t yet fully realized). That is what makes it such a compelling candidate to be the first platform that serves true digital books.
  • Books that are static, don’t allow customization, don’t connect with other information on the device, and don’t leverage social connectivity aren’t the future, no matter how sophisticated the device that serves them. They’re simply the past repackaged.
  • Given what I’ve seen of its features and approaches, the iPad shows the promise to engender such a change, though much development will have to take place for it to realize its potential. Nonetheless, the innovation it offers in three critical areas is especially compelling: accessibility, participation, and customization. Central to all three of these is the fact that the iPad is not a single-use, standalone device; it’s a powerful, converged platform with robust development tools and capabilities.
  • I would argue that the key accessibility feature of the iPad is its apparent “lack” of an interface (a feature Apple’s marketing is working hard to underscore). Unlike all of the other similar devices (including those running Apple’s standard OS), which require users to learn to negotiate complex symbolic interfaces — files, folders, hierarchies, toolbars, navigational buttons — the iPad limits or even eliminates these in favor of touch, an approach intuitive even to those too young to read.
  • The collapsing of symbolic complexity into the simplicity of touch enables participation by new groups of people — even relative technophobes — and this mirrors the increased accessibility offered by Gutenberg’s revolution while lowering the barrier characteristic of most recent technologies.
  • For those interested in culture and creativity, this is an exciting prospect.
  • In Gutenberg’s case, the increase in accessibility led to a dramatic increase in cultural participation, and this is another way the iPad differentiates itself from many of its peer devices.
  • Put in the hands of readers and students, the robust capabilities of its new version of iWork, combined with access to the complete range of apps on the App Store and an entirely new generation of native apps, the iPad could provide access to professional-quality creative tools that empower a new set of participants
  • the iPad’s blend of social and contextual technologies and its ease of customization offer useful ways for the device to help users sort, focus, and control the information around them. The iPad’s networking capabilities, linked to a new generation of digital books, could help people discover both new texts and the members of a discussion group who could help them process what they’re reading. Combined with a portable format that allows readers to carry their books into various contexts, this could be incredibly powerful. One imagines, for example, a field-guide to forests linked to live discussion partners, allowing a reader to discover the forest in a new and engaging way that offers the advantages of both the first and second informational ages. Yet this sort of capability also reveals an area where the iPad falls surprisingly short: its lack of a camera (let alone two, one forward and one backward facing) means the device has limited capabilities for interesting emerging technologies like augmented reality — a staple of recently-developed apps. In terms of future eBooks, a volume of Hemingway that could alert readers that they were only two blocks from the café Les Deux Magots, for example, and offer an augmented tour of the place or that could direct the reader of Brontë to a moor would be transformational indeed. Perhaps we’ll see such capabilities on iPad 2.0.
Barbara Lindsey

Digital Natives - 0 views

  •  
    A collaborative space supported by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. The project's goal is to better understand young people's experiences with digital media, including Internet, cell phones and related technologies. By gaining insight into how digital natives make sense of their interactions in this digital lanscape, we may address the issues their practices raise, learn how to harness the opportunities their digital fluency presents, and shape our regulatory and educational frameworks in a way that advances the public interest. Thx to Wes Fryer for this find!
anonymous

Confessions of a Podcast Junkie: A Student Perspective (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 3 views

  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How many in our class own an iPod? Other mp3 player?
    • Inas Ayyoub
       
      I don't have any of them, but after studying and teaching in an American university , I feel it is one of the important things that I have to own!!
    • Kemen Zabala
       
      I own an iPod touch and I believe my cellphone is also part mp3 player
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      I have 2
    • Blanca Garcia Valenzuela
       
      I have a mp3 player, not an iPod and, anyway, I do not see why iPods are so popular...
    • Catherine Ross
       
      I own an iPod but I never use it!
    • Celeste Arrieta
       
      I don't have an IPod
    • Celeste Arrieta
       
      You made very interesting comments, Inas! Congratulations!!
    • suzanne ondrus
       
      I own one but have yet to use it! :(
    • Christopher Laine
       
      Mine doesn't really work since I put it in the laundry. But I never used it much anyway because it's not compatible with .flac files.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • transfer lectures and course material
  • "The good thing was that you could listen to a section over and over again if you wanted to review it," Clemen says. "There were a few podcasts that I had to review a couple of times. I could write out what he was saying and listen to what he was saying again." Reviewing came in handy, they all say, especially during project or exam times. "[With the podcasts], I've got more material to go back to if I wanted to review that module," Clemen says. "Whereas with the rest of the material, I just have some PowerPoint and my own notes."
  • The trick, students say, is to make sure that there is something to gain by attending class and downloading the lecture.
  • the material has to be relevant to the rest of the course. Otherwise, it's just a cool technology to have." Material should have a clear connection to the actual course, making a seamless transition between face time and the online realm.
  • Students stress the need to keep audio and video concise and engaging.
  • ust because a student totes an iPod on campus doesn't mean that the student is podcast-savvy.
  • "There aren't any time constraints. Your podcast doesn't have to be an exact amount of time. You have carte blanche to change the format and grow your show." He also helps capture audio from guest speakers so that the programs can be
  • n to the guest lectures while on the bus, at the gym, or in their dorm rooms. Still, Stein never felt the urge to skip class. "It was nice to know that if you missed class, you could record the lectures," she says. "But the iPod didn't encourage you to miss class. There's not a chalkboard that you can see or problems that you can see worked out. I think more people show up in a [podcasting] course because it encourages more interaction."
  • "It's much better than writing a paper. It's more interesting, much more fun, and much more creative. You get a lot of time to work on it, and it's more collaborative because you're working with other people. You're creating the performance as you go and then continuously working on it." Creating a podcast didn't mean less work, he says.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Your thoughts?
    • suzanne ondrus
       
      This seems to go on the idea of trying to make one's class accessible to everyone. So with podcasts students with strong oral skills might excell.
    • Inas Ayyoub
       
      Still, we don't want students to end up with poor writing skills. So I guess with the help of other uses of technolog like wikis we can make writing papers more fun and help stdents improve that as well.
  • Though her goal was to increase learning for her peers in the anatomy course, she found that creating the material was a boon to her own learning. "As a student creating the podcasts, I had the chance to learn a lot more than I would have taking a course," she says. "It's about learning how to teach the material and how to make a narration out of it. You have this intimate knowledge of the material, and now you know how to show the different sides of an issue."
  • Besides the entertainment value, Westfall and Finnegan say that the podcasts were especially useful for reviewing material. They used the podcasts as refreshers throughout the semester and during exam time. In addition, creating a segment meant that they had to brush up on their own knowledge of the subject.
  • I don't want [the podcasts] to overlap with lectures too much; I still want people to go to the lecture. This is a very relaxed way to get the information to them. They can do it on their own time and download it whenever."
    • Inas Ayyoub
       
      Though the podcasts arre a great idea for reviewing materials and catching up on things you missed in a class, still they will result in having less and less face-to-face interaction which is still needed especially when learning languages. I guess students will be tempted to miss classes more and more , even though the article suggested that using podcasts will encourage them not to do so!!
  • Knowing my own podcast history, I had to wonder just how quickly the students were jumping on board. Armed with my same recorder—though it was now slightly rougher for the wear—I asked students at colleges and universities across North America about their iPod and MP3 use, their familiarity with podcasting, and just how they saw podcasting as part of the classroom.
  • Knowing my own podcast history, I had to wonder just how quickly the students were jumping on board. Armed with my same recorder—th
  •  
    "Besides the entertainment value, Westfall and Finnegan say that the podcasts were especially useful for reviewing material. They used the podcasts as refreshers throughout the semester and during exam time. In addition, creating a segment meant that they had to brush up on their own knowledge of the subject."
Barbara Lindsey

Teaching Strategies: The Teaching Philosophy/Teaching Statement - 0 views

  •  
    University of MI teaching philosophy statements
Barbara Lindsey

News: The Mobile Campus - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • 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.
Barbara Lindsey

UC Cybercampus?: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA - 0 views

  •  
    As the University of California regents meet this week to grapple with the system's ongoing fiscal crisis, a proposal to create a degree-granting "cybercampus" is attracting attention. Proponents argue that an online campus could raise funds and increase access for underserved communities. But some faculty members fear the plan could undermine educational quality for little financial return.
Barbara Lindsey

Education/EduCourse/Announcement - MozillaWiki - 0 views

  •  
    The Mozilla Foundation, in collaboration with ccLearn/Creative Commons and the Peer 2 Peer University, launches a practical online seminar on open education. This six week course is targeted at educators who will gain basic skills in open licensing, open technology, and open pedagogy; work on prototypes of innovative open education projects; and get input from some of the world leading innovators along the way.
Barbara Lindsey

A Fairy Tale? « Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice - 0 views

  • 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.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Called “The Eight Year Study,” each high school decided for itself what curricula, schedules, and class sizes would be. There were no college admission requirements or must-take tests. Old lesson plans were scrapped. One school sent classes into the West Virginia coal region to study unions. Science, history, art, and math were often combined in projects that students and teachers planned together.
  • A few principals blocked the experiment. Some school faculties divided into warring factions.
  • While there was much variation among the schools, there were also common elements. Many of the large public high schools (of the 30, fifteen were private) created small schools within the larger one. Principals increased the authority of teachers to design and steer the program; teachers crossed departmental boundaries and created a core curriculum (math/science and English/social studies), set aside three hours a day for teams to work with groups of students, and planned weekly units with students.
  • evaluators established 1,475 pairs of college students, each consisting of a graduate from an experimental school and one graduate of another high school matched as closely as possible as to age, sex, race, social class, and academic performance. They then compared their performance in college.
  • Evaluators found that graduates of the thirty schools earned a slightly higher grade average and more academic honors than those who attended regular high school. Furthermore, the “guinea pigs,” as they were called, were more precise in their thinking, displayed more ingenuity in meeting new situations, and demonstrated an active interest in national and world issues than their matched counterpart.
  • results showed over 70 years ago was that there was no one single best way of schooling teenagers.
  • Later generations of reformers seldom inquired or cared about this large-scale, non-federally funded experiment that showed convincingly that schools, given the freedom to experiment, could produce graduates that not only did well academically in college but, far more important, displayed an active interest in civic affairs, were resourceful in handling new situations, and could think clearly.
  • 1. When engaged teachers, administrators, and students are given the freedom to experiment and the help to do it, they will come through. 2. There is no one best way of schooling youth. 3. Students can graduate high school who are academically engaged, involved in their communities, and thoughtful problem-solvers. 4. Standards of excellence that work in schools are those that are set and done locally by adults and students—not imposed from the top-down.
Barbara Lindsey

udtechtoolkit - home - 0 views

  •  
    Web 2.0 tools with universal design for learning approach
Barbara Lindsey

Choosing An Open License - the P2PU Experience - Creative Commons - 0 views

  •  
    Peer 2 Peer University details their process of choosing an open license for their content.
Barbara Lindsey

News: The Web of Babel - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • 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.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Language content makes up about 95 percent of the downloads from the Emory iTunes U site.
  • the most popular content is audio and video files that were originally developed not for a general audience, but by professors as supplements to college-level coursework,
  • Because language demonstrations often require audio and sometimes video components (e.g., tutorials on how to write in a character-based alphabet), and students often like to practice while on the move, iTunes is in many ways an ideal vehicle for language-based instructional content.
  • what we do offer is an online supplement that enhances what happens both in the classroom and in foreign study in the culture — and it is always there as a resource for our students, because it’s online.”
Barbara Lindsey

iPads for College Classrooms? Not So Fast, Some Professors Say. - Technology - The Chro... - 3 views

  • 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.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • At Reed College, having all the texts available in a political-science class on the iPad meant it was easier to refer to readings and pull in outside material for discussion, says Martin Ringle, the college's chief technology officer.
  • Course readings were converted to PDF's at Reed, which allowed students to mark them up using an application called iAnnotate, but Mr. Ringle acknowledges that this wouldn't work for all classes, because many texts can't easily be converted to PDF's, and many electronic textbooks don't allow annotation.
  • While Apple has promoted the iPad's ability to change learning, Ms. Simon says that as far as she knows, the company isn't working with leaders in the learning process: professors themselves.
  • but consumer decisions rather than educational ones will probably determine which tablets students purchase—and which ones colleges will support, he says.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Should this concern us? Does this happen with technology in general?
Barbara Lindsey

danah boyd | apophenia » "Real Names" Policies Are an Abuse of Power - 0 views

  • 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
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • If companies like Facebook and Google are actually committed to the safety of its users, they need to take these complaints seriously. Not everyone is safer by giving out their real name. Quite the opposite; many people are far LESS safe when they are identifiable. And those who are least safe are often those who are most vulnerable.
  • Likewise, the issue of reputation must be turned on its head when thinking about marginalized people. Folks point to the issue of people using pseudonyms to obscure their identity and, in theory, “protect” their reputation.
  • The assumption baked into this is that the observer is qualified to actually assess someone’s reputation. All too often, and especially with marginalized people, the observer takes someone out of context and judges them inappropriately based on what they get online.
  • There is no universal context, no matter how many times geeks want to tell you that you can be one person to everyone at every point. But just because people are doing what it takes to be appropriate in different contexts, to protect their safety, and to make certain that they are not judged out of context, doesn’t mean that everyone is a huckster. Rather, people are responsibly and reasonably responding to the structural conditions of these new media. And there’s nothing acceptable about those who are most privileged and powerful telling those who aren’t that it’s OK for their safety to be undermined. And you don’t guarantee safety by stopping people from using pseudonyms, but you do undermine people’s safety by doing so.
Barbara Lindsey

How to Save the Traditional University, From the Inside Out - Commentary - The Chronicl... - 1 views

  • The scholarship of teaching, in particular, has been overlooked for too long.
  • They serve as conservators and promulgators of our cultural memories
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      So is the university just a museum of old knowledge?
  • 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."
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      What is so unique about a physical campus that mentoring can only occur in this way?
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • No one has created a better mechanism for discovery, memory, and mentoring than the one devised by innovative American academics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Would you agree? 
  • Undergraduate students who prepare for face-to-face classes via online lectures, problem sets, and discussion boards can take Socratic discovery to levels like those of the best graduate business and law schools.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Speaking essentially of a flipped classroom model.
  • Online degrees are steadily getting better, and the cost of providing them is a small fraction of what traditional institutions spend per graduate. Faced with an either-or choice, many young college students will follow the lead of adult learners: They'll take the affordable online option over the socially preferable but financially inaccessible traditional college experience.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Should the conversation focus primarily on cost? Who benefits? Will learning improve?
  • In addition to adopting online learning as what we call a sustaining innovation, avoiding disruption will require incumbent institutions to effectively change their DNA. Most will need to become more focused on undergraduate students, cutting back on graduate programs that serve relatively few students while consuming much faculty time and generating little of the prestige hoped for when they were created. Programmatic offerings need to be more focused: Some majors should be dropped, and many should be shortened, making it more feasible for students to complete a degree in four years. The number of departments and centers at most institutions needs strategic shrinking.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      What are your thoughts about this?
  •  
    fall 2011 syllabus
Barbara Lindsey

Distance Learning Courses and Adult Education - The Open University - 0 views

  •  
    Fall 2011 syllabus
Barbara Lindsey

GUTS-Greater University Tutoring Service - 0 views

  •  
    Peer tutoring. Students get scholarship $$ to tutor other students in academic subjects.
« First ‹ Previous 61 - 80 of 182 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page