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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.

I have found the Digital Nation website to be an extraordinary resource which I used repeatedly in my teaching last semester, drawing in many different segments to stimulate discussion, to allow students to hear more directly the point of view and see the personalities of writers we were engaging with through our readings. What works for me about the website is that it is multi-vocal, allowing many points of view to be expressed on more or less equal footing, encouraging reflection as people make their own decisions about what to watch and how to juxtapose the pieces. I doubt any two readers took the same path through this material or any two teachers used the resources the website provides in precisely the same ways. Y

The website allows us to ask our own questions, while the documentary tells us what to think.

For example, I might use the documentary to talk about the primacy effect -- the degree to which what comes first in a linear media experience sets the horizon of expectations and frames how we understand the material which follows. It strikes me that we go more than 20 minutes into the film before we hear what might be considered an authoritative voice offering a sympathetic comment about the value of digital media and that initial critical framing of media as a social problem gets reasserted multiple times in the course of the documentary. This surely encourages greater skepticism when alternative viewpoints get expressed later.

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.

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.

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.

we have to create engagement which works educationally for more than 25% of students, precisely because we have to work against the dominant culture - "math is hard," "history is stupid," "languages are un-necessary." And we need to do that using the efficiencies of contemporary technologies.

So tech, in my view, increases factual knowledge. It also allows a constant check of that knowledge. Math facts may stay fairly stable, but not the nations of Europe. Biological knowledge, chemical knowledge, changes constantly. We obviously need both, but a memorizer is not a person with a trustable education. A "finder" may be.

the best thing we will have done for our children (and future generations) is to have fully engaged them in empowered learning, building relationships and thinking creatively - and right now technology is one of the tools that facilitates that kind of education, so we need to use it! http://www.iwasthinking.ca/2008/10/09/its-not-about-the-technology/

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.

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."

I have found that in both my traditional physical classrooms and online environments, the chances of successful outcomes are multiplied when every person in the group makes a commitment to active participation in helping others learn.

When a sufficient number of people jump in and start contributing and building on one another's contributions, it becomes clear to all that it's not just about the teacher's performance and the student's ability to complete assignments. It's about our joint effort to make the whole of our encounter more valuable than just the sum of our individual learning.

I type roles on the whiteboard and show how to use the whiteboard tools to enter, format and move around elements. Roles include searchers, chat summarizers, session summarizers, mindmap leaders, session bloggers. I ask co-learners to write their own names on the whiteboard next to the roles they want to take, show them how to create break-out rooms to coordinate their collaborations, and ask the summarizers to feed their output to the bloggers, who take responsibility for posting a reflective summary of the session later

Mr. Somade told me recently that "the general idea is that if I don't have to come to class, I don't want to come to class—and technology is giving students more and more reason not to come."

In an era when students can easily grab material online, including lectures by gifted speakers in every field, a learning environment that avoids courses completely—or seriously reshapes them—might produce a very effective new form of college.

much of what students rate as the most valuable part of their learning experience at college these days takes place outside the traditional classroom, citing data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, an annual study based at Indiana University at Bloomington. Four of the eight "high-impact" learning activities identified by survey participants required no classroom time at all: internships, study-abroad programs, senior thesis or other "capstone" projects, or the mundane-sounding "undergraduate research," meaning working with faculty members on original research, much as graduate students do.

We promote educational opportunity and social justice by providing high-quality university education to all who wish to realise their ambitions and fulfil their potential.

Nearly all of our undergraduate courses have no formal entry requirements, either prior qualifications or experience.

We believe that it is the qualifications with which our students leave, rather than those with which they enter, that count.

Amid financial crises, humanities departments at many public universities have been razed. But even amid cuts, there has been a surge in interest in the digital humanities -- a branch of scholarship that takes the computational rigor that has long undergirded the sciences and applies it the study of history, language, and culture.

The NEH held a symposium on Tuesday for 60 recipients of its 2011 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants, most of whom were given between $25,000 and $50,000. They were allowed two minutes each to describe their projects.

“While we have been anguishing over the fate of the humanities, the humanities have been busily moving into, and even colonizing, the fields that were supposedly displacing them,”