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Wessam Abedelaziz

Convenience, Communications, and Control: How Students Use Technology | Resources | EDU... - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...6070

student survey technology educause

shared by Wessam Abedelaziz on 27 Oct 08 - Cached
  • They are characterized as preferring teamwork, experiential activities, and the use of technology
  • Doing is more important than knowing, and learning is accomplished through trial and error as opposed to a logical and rule-based approach.2 Similarly, Paul Hagner found that these students not only possess the skills necessary to use these new communication forms, but there is an ever increasing expectation on their part that these new communication paths be used
    • Nicole McClure
      Nicole McClure on 31 Oct 08
       
      This phrase makes me a little uneasy. I recognize that these students are different, but I understand this a difference in learning style, not content. "Doing is more important than knowing" implies, at least to me, that a full understanding of the content. There has to be a little of both.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 31 Oct 08
       
      It's an interesting question. What is 'knowing'? And how do we know what we know?
    • Wessam Abedelaziz
      Wessam Abedelaziz on 31 Oct 08
       
      I guess doing is more important than knowing in the sense of actual research. We should have a theoritical background and KNOW what is behind but it is also important to try things out and make mistakes and have a feed back. I would say, it is more of an individual thing and it is up to the type of learners and how they learn things. They might be learners who learn by touching things and try it out or just by having a look at it and they will be fine
    • Wessam Abedelaziz
      Wessam Abedelaziz on 31 Oct 08
       
      Sorry, it is in the sense of ' Action Research" not 'actual reseach'
  • Much of the work to date, while interesting and compelling, is intuitive and largely based on qualitative data and observation.
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • There is an inexorable trend among college students to universal ownership, mobility, and access to technology.
  • Students were asked about the applications they used on their electronic devices. They reported that they use technology first for educational purposes, followed by communication.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 08
       
      All self-reported. Would have been powerful if could have actually tracked a representative sample and compared actual use with reported use.
    • Wessam Abedelaziz
      Wessam Abedelaziz on 31 Oct 08
       
      I don't believe this line!!
  • presentation software was driven primarily by the requirements of the students' major and the curriculum.
  • Communications and entertainment are very much related to gender and age.
  • From student interviews, a picture emerged of student technology use driven by the demands of the major and the classes that students take. Seniors reported spending more time overall on a computer than do freshmen, and they reported greater use of a computer at a place of employment. Seniors spent more hours on the computer each week in support of their educational activities and also more time on more advanced applications—spreadsheets, presentations, and graphics.
  • Confirming what parents suspect, students with the lowest grade point averages (GPAs) spend significantly more time playing computer games; students with the highest GPAs spend more hours weekly using the computer in support of classroom activities. At the University of Minnesota, Crookston, students spent the most hours on the computer in support of classroom activities. This likely reflects the deliberate design of the curriculum to use a laptop extensively. In summary, the curriculum's technology requirements are major motivators for students to learn to use specialized software.
  • The interviews indicated that students are skilled with basic office suite applications but tend to know just enough technology functionality to accomplish their work; they have less in-depth application knowledge or problem solving skills.
  • According to McEuen, student technology skills can be likened to writing skills: Students come to college knowing how to write, but they are not developed writers. The analogy holds true for information technology, and McEuen suggested that colleges and universities approach information technology in the same way they approach writing.6
  • he major requires the development of higher-level skill sets with particular applications.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 08
       
      Not really quantitative--self-reported data back by selected qualitative interviews
  • The comparative literature on student IT skill self-assessment suggests that students overrate their skills; freshmen overrate their skills more than seniors, and men overrate their skills more than women.7 Our data supports these conclusions. Judy Doherty, director of the Student Technologies Resource Group at Colgate University, remarked on student skill assessment, "Students state in their job applications that they are good if not very good, but when tested their skills are average to poor, and they need a lot of training."8
  • Mary Jane Smetanka of the Minneapolis–St. Paul Star Tribune reported that some students are so conditioned by punch-a-button problem solving on computers that they approach problems with a scattershot impulsiveness instead of methodically working them through. In turn, this leads to problem-solving difficulties.
  • We expected to find that the Net Generation student prefers classes that use technology. What we found instead is a bell curve with a preference for a moderate use of technology in the classroom (see Figure 1).
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 08
       
      More information needs to be given to find out why--may be tool and method not engaging.
  • It is not surprising that if technology is used well by the instructor, students will come to appreciate its benefits.
  • A student's major was also an important predictor of preferences for technology in the classroom (see Table 3), with engineering students having the highest preference for technology in the classroom (67.8 percent), followed by business students (64.3 percent).
  • we found that many of the students most skilled in the use of technology had mixed feelings about technology in the classroom.
  • he highest scores were given to improved communications, followed by factors related to the management of classroom activities. Lower impact activities had to do with comprehension of classroom materials (complex concepts).
  • The instructors' use of technology in my classes has increased my interest in the subject matter. 3.25 Classes that use information technology are more likely to focus on real-world tasks and examples.
  • I spend more time engaged in course activities in those courses that require me to use technology.
  • Interestingly, students do not feel that use of information technology in classes greatly increases the amount of time engaged with course activities (3.22 mean).12 This is in direct contrast to faculty perceptions reported in an earlier study, where 65 percent of faculty reported they perceived that students spend more time engaged with course materials
  • Only 12.7 percent said the most valuable benefit was improved learning; 3.7 percent perceived no benefit whatsoever. Note that students could only select one response, so more than 12.7 percent may have felt learning was improved, but it was not ranked highest. These findings compare favorably with a study done by Douglas Havelka at the University of Miami in Oxford, Ohio, who identified the top six benefits of the current implementation of IT as improving work efficiency, affecting the way people behave, improving communications, making life more convenient, saving time, and improving learning ability.14
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 08
       
      Would have been good to know exactly what kinds of technologies were meant here.
  • Our data suggest that we are at best at the cusp of technologies being employed to improve learning.
  • The interactive features least used by faculty were the features that students indicated contributed the most to their learning.
  • he students in this study called our attention to performance by noting an uneven diffusion of innovation using this technology. This may be due, in part, to faculty or student skill. It may also be due to a lack of institutional recognition of innovation, especially as the successful use of course management systems affects or does not affect faculty tenure, promotion, and merit decisions
  • Humanities 7.7% 47.9% 40.2
  • What we found was that many necessary skills had to be learned at the college or university and that the motivation for doing so was very much tied to the requirements of the curriculum. Similarly, the students in our survey had not gained the necessary skills to use technology in support of academic work outside the classroom. We found a significant need for further training in the use of information technology in support of learning and problem-solving skills.
  • Course management systems were used most by both faculty and students for communication of information and administrative activities and much less in support of learning.
  • In 1997, Michael Hooker proclaimed, "higher education is on the brink of a revolution." Hooker went on to note that two of the greatest challenges our institutions face are those of "harnessing the power of digital technology and responding to the information revolution."18 Hooker and many others, however, did not anticipate the likelihood that higher education's learning revolution would be a journey of a thousand miles rather than a discrete event. Indeed, a study of learning's last great revolution—the invention of moveable type—reveals, too, a revolution conducted over centuries leading to the emergence of a publishing industry, intellectual property rights law, the augmentation of customized lectures with textbooks, and so forth.
  • Qualitative data were collected by means of focus groups and individual interviews. We interviewed undergraduate students, administrators, and individuals identified as experts in the field of student technology use in the classroom. Student focus groups and interviews of administrators were conducted at six of the thirteen schools participating in the study.
  • The institutions chosen represent a nonrepresentative mix of the different types of higher education institution in the United States, in terms of Carnegie class as well as location, source of funding, and levels of technology emphasis. Note, however, that we consider our findings to be instructive rather than conclusive of student experiences at different types of Carnegie institutions.
  • Both the ECAR study on faculty use of course management systems and this study of student experiences with information technology concluded that, while information technology is indeed making important inroads into classroom and learning activities, to date the effects are largely in the convenience of postsecondary teaching and learning and do not yet constitute a "learning revolution." This should not surprise us. The invention of moveable type enhanced, nearly immediately, access to published information and reduced the time needed to produce new publications. This invention did not itself change literacy levels, teaching styles, learning styles, or other key markers of a learning revolution. These changes, while catalyzed by the new technology, depended on slower social changes to institutions. I believe that is what we are witnessing in higher education today.
  • The qualitative data suggest a slightly different picture. Students have very basic office suite skills as well as e-mail and basic Web surfing skills. Moving beyond basic activities is problematic. It appears that they do not recognize the enhanced functionality of the applications they own and use.
  • It cannot be assumed that they come to college prepared to use advanced software applications.
  • 25.6 percent of the students preferred limited or no use of technology in the classroom.
  • "Information technology is just a tool. Like all tools, if used properly it can be an asset. If it is used improperly, it can become an obstacle to achieving its intended purpose. Never is it a panacea."
Nicole McClure

Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles: Implications for Investments in Technology ... - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...6069

shared by Nicole McClure on 10 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Research indicates that each of these media, when designed for education, fosters particular types of interactions that enable—and undercut—various learning styles.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      How much do we know about our students' learning styles? How do we know this?
  • Over the next decade, three complementary interfaces will shape how people learn
  • The familiar "world to the desktop." Provides access to distant experts and archives and enables collaborations, mentoring relationships, and virtual communities of practice. This interface is evolving through initiatives such as Internet2. "Alice in Wonderland" multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs). Participants' avatars (self-created digital characters) interact with computer-based agents and digital artifacts in virtual contexts. The initial stages of studies on shared virtual environments are characterized by advances in Internet games and work in virtual reality. Ubiquitous computing. Mobile wireless devices infuse virtual resources as we move through the real world. The early stages of "augmented reality" interfaces are characterized by research on the role of "smart objects" and "intelligent contexts" in learning and doing.
  • ...48 more annotations...
  • But what is so special about the egocentric perspectives and situated learning now enabled by emerging media? After all, each of us lives with an egocentric perspective in the real world and has many opportunities for situated learning without using technology. One attribute that makes mediated immersion different and powerful is the ability to access information resources and psychosocial community distributed across distance and time, broadening and deepening experience. A second important attribute is the ability to create interactions and activities in mediated experience not possible in the real world, such as teleporting within a virtual environment, enabling a distant person to see a real-time image of your local environment, or interacting with a (simulated) chemical spill in a busy public setting. Both of these attributes are actualized in the Alice-in-Wonderland interface.
  • Net Generation learning styles stem primarily from the world-to-the-desktop interface; however, the growing prevalence of interfaces to virtual environments and augmented realities is beginning to foster so-called neomillennial learning styles in users of all ages.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      What is the timeline?
    • Nicole McClure
      Nicole McClure on 14 Nov 08
       
      That's an interesting question - sometimes I think we are already on the other side of this, meaning we've already passed it in some ways. Last night I was out for dinner at the Main Street and I saw something that was a little crazy. My husband and I were using my cellphone to look up words that would help trigger a creative name for his new company - a UConn professor (who shall remain unnamed :)) was using his iPhone for something other than a phone call - and the women at the table across from me were also engaged in half converstation - half text message/email, etc. The reason that I bring this up is that all of these people, myself included, are NOT part of the millenial generation (way past I'm afraid!) and we were using this stuff. As history goes - if the "grown-ups" are using it, the kids are over it and on to something else.
  • Immersion is the subjective impression that one is participating in a comprehensive, realistic experience.
  • Beyond actional and symbolic immersion, advances in interface technology are now creating virtual environments and augmented realities that induce a psychological sense of sensory and physical immersion.
  • Inducing a participant's symbolic immersion involves triggering powerful semantic associations via the content of an experience.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      Felice's Utopian City
  • The research on virtual reality Salzman and I conducted on frames of reference found that the exocentric and the egocentric FORs have different strengths for learning. Our studies established that learning ideally involves a "bicentric" perspective alternating between egocentric and exocentric FORs.
  • The capability of computer interfaces to foster psychological immersion enables technology-intensive educational experiences that draw on a powerful pedagogy: situated learning.
  • The major schools of thought cited are behaviorist theories of learning (presentational instruction), cognitivist theories of learning (tutoring and guided learning by doing), and situated theories of learning (mentoring and apprenticeships in communities of practice).
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      What kinds of learning environments do you prefer and what kinds do you create for your students?
  • Situated learning requires authentic contexts, activities, and assessment coupled with guidance from expert modeling, mentoring, and "legitimate peripheral participation."8 As an example of legitimate peripheral participation, graduate students work within the laboratories of expert researchers, who model the practice of scholarship. These students interact with experts in research as well as with other members of the research team who understand the complex processes of scholarship to varying degrees. While in these laboratories, students gradually move from novice researchers to more advanced roles, with the skills and expectations for them evolving.
  • Potentially quite powerful, situated learning is much less used for instruction than behaviorist or cognitivist approaches. This is largely because creating tacit, relatively unstructured learning in complex real-world settings is difficult.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      Not too far in the future!
  • Initial research on Environmental Detectives and other AR-based educational simulations demonstrates that this type of immersive, situated learning can effectively engage students in critical thinking about authentic scenarios.
  • However, virtual environments and ubiquitous computing can draw on the power of situated learning by creating immersive, extended experiences with problems and contexts similar to the real world.9 In particular, MUVEs and real-world settings augmented with virtual information provide the capability to create problem-solving communities in which participants can gain knowledge and skills through interacting with other participants who have varied levels of skills, enabling legitimate peripheral participation driven by intrinsic sociocultural forces.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      One of the most difficult skills to master.
  • Situated learning is important in part because of the crucial issue of transfer. Transfer is defined as the application of knowledge learned in one situation to another situation and is demonstrated if instruction on a learning task leads to improved performance on a transfer task, typically a skilled performance in a real-world setting
  • Moreover, the evolution of an individual's or group's identity is an important type of learning for which simulated experiences situated in virtual environments or augmented realities are well suited. Reflecting on and refining an individual identity is often a significant issue for higher education students of all ages, and learning to evolve group and organizational identity is a crucial skill in enabling innovation and in adapting to shifting contexts.
  • Immersion is important in this process of identity exploration because virtual identity is unfettered by physical attributes such as gender, race, and disabilities.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      Don't agree with this. We come to any environment with our own baggage and we do not interact in a neutral social context.
  • Thanks to out-of-game trading of in-game items, Norrath, the virtual setting of the MMOG EverQuest, is the seventy-seventh largest economy in the real world, with a GNP per capita between that of Russia and Bulgaria. One platinum piece, the unit of currency in Norrath, trades on real world exchange markets higher than both the Yen and the Lira (Castronova, 2001).14
  • Multiple teams of students can access the MUVE simultaneously, each individual manipulating an avatar which is "sent back in time" to this virtual environment. Students must collaborate to share the data each team collects. Beyond textual conversation, students can project to each other "snapshots" of their current individual point of view (when someone has discovered an item of general interest) and also can "teleport" to join anyone on their team for joint investigation. Each time a team reenters the world, several months of time have passed in River City, so learners can track the dynamic evolution of local problems.
  • In our research on this educational MUVE based on situated learning, we are studying usability, student motivation, student learning, and classroom implementation issues. The results thus far are promising: All learners are highly motivated, including students typically unengaged in classroom settings. All students build fluency in distributed modes of communication and expression and value using multiple media because each empowers different types of communication, activities, experiences, and expressions. Even typically low-performing students can master complex inquiry skills and sophisticated content. Shifts in the pedagogy within the MUVE alter the pattern of student performance.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      Would like to see research on this.
  • Research shows that many participants value this functionality and choose to access the Web page after leaving the museum.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      More could be done with this.
  • Participants in these distributed simulations use location-aware handheld computers (with GPS technology), allowing users to physically move throughout a real-world location while collecting place-dependent simulated field data, interviewing virtual characters, and collaboratively investigating simulated scenarios.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      Much better
  • he defining quality of a learning community is that there is a culture of learning, in which everyone is involved in a collective effort of understanding. There are four characteristics that such a culture must have: (1) diversity of expertise among its members, who are valued for their contributions and given support to develop, (2) a shared objective of continually advancing the collective knowledge and skills, (3) an emphasis on learning how to learn, and (4) mechanisms for sharing what is learned. If a learning community is presented with a problem, then the learning community can bring its collective knowledge to bear on the problem. It is not necessary that each member assimilate everything that the community knows, but each should know who within the community has relevant expertise to address any problem. This is a radical departure from the traditional view of schooling, with its emphasis on individual knowledge and performance, and the expectation that students will acquire the same body of knowledge at the same time.26
  • This immersion in virtual environments and augmented realities shapes participants' learning styles beyond what using sophisticated computers and telecommunications has fostered thus far, with multiple implications for higher education.
  • Students were most effective in learning and problem-solving when they collectively sought, sieved, and synthesized experiences rather than individually locating and absorbing information from some single best source.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      How does this 'fit' learning goals and teaching styles in our program?
  • Rheingold's forecasts draw on lifestyles seen at present among young people who are high-end users of new media
  • Notion of place is layered/blended/multiple; mobility and nomadicity prevalent among dispersed, fragmented, fluctuating habitats (for example, coffeehouses near campus)
  • Rather than having core identities defined through a primarily local set of roles and relationships, people would express varied aspects of their multifaceted identities through alternate extended experiences in distributed virtual environments and augmented realities.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      How is this different from current experiences for individuals working within/across different social groups and boundaries?
  • one-third of U.S. households now have broadband access to the Internet. In the past three years, 14 million U.S. families have linked their computers with wireless home networks. Some 55 percent of Americans now carry cell phones
  • Mitchell's forecasts25 are similar to Rheingold's in many respects. He too envisions largely tribal lifestyles distributed across dispersed, fragmented, fluctuating habitats: electronic nomads wandering among virtual campfires. People's senses and physical agency are extended outward and into the intangible, at considerable cost to individual privacy. Individual identity is continuously reformed via an ever-shifting series of networking with others and with tools. People express themselves through nonlinear, associational webs of representations rather than linear "stories" and co-design services rather than selecting a precustomized variant from a menu of possibilities.
  • More and more, though, people of all ages will have lifestyles involving frequent immersion in both virtual and augmented reality. How might distributed, immersive media be designed specifically for education, and what neomillennial learning styles might they induce?
  • Guided social constructivism and situated learning as major forms of pedagogy
  • Peer-developed and peer-rated forms of assessment complement faculty grading, which is often based on individual accomplishment in a team performance context  Assessments provide formative feedback on instructional effectiveness
  • Mediated immersion creates distributed learning communities, which have different strengths and limits than location-bound learning communities confined to classroom settings and centered on the teacher and archival materials.27
  • Multipurpose habitats—creating layered/blended/personalizable places rather than specialized locations (such as computer labs)
  • Neomillenial Versus Millennial Learning Styles
  • Emphasis is placed on implications for strategic investments in physical plant, technology infrastructure, and professional development.
  • o the extent that some of these ideas about neomillennial learning styles are accurate, campuses that make strategic investments in physical plant, technical infrastructure, and professional development along the dimensions suggested will gain a considerable competitive advantage in both recruiting top students and teaching them effectively.
  • such as textbooks linked to course ratings by students)
  • Mirroring": Immersive virtual environments provide replicas of distant physical settings
  • Middleware, interoperability, open content, and open source
  • Finding information Sequential assimilation of linear information stream
  • Student products generally tests or papers Grading centers on individual performance
  • These ideas are admittedly speculative rather than based on detailed evidence and are presented to stimulate reaction and dialogue about these trends.
  • f we accept much of the analysis above
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      But have they made the case for its educational value?
  • students of all ages with increasingly neomillennial learning styles will be drawn to colleges and universities that have these capabilities. Four implications for investments in professional development also are apparent. Faculty will increasingly need capabilities in:
  • Some of these shifts are controversial for many faculty; all involve "unlearning" almost unconscious beliefs, assumptions, and values about the nature of teaching, learning, and the academy. Professional development that requires unlearning necessitates high levels of emotional/social support in addition to mastering the intellectual/technical dimensions involved. The ideal form for this type of professional development is distributed learning communities so that the learning process is consistent with the knowledge and culture to be acquired. In other words, faculty must themselves experience mediated immersion and develop neomillennial learning styles to continue teaching effectively as the nature of students alters.
  • Differences among individuals are greater than dissimilarities between groups, so students in any age cohort will present a mixture of neomillennial, millennial, and traditional learning styles
  • The technologies discussed are emerging rather than mature, so their final form and influences on users are not fully understood. A substantial number of faculty and administrators will likely dismiss and resist some of the ideas and recommendations presented here.
Barbara Lindsey

Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix (EDUCAUS... - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...44592

web2.0 mashup educause

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Dec 08 - Cached
  • Remix is the reworking or adaptation of an existing work. The remix may be subtle, or it may completely redefine how the work comes across. It may add elements from other works, but generally efforts are focused on creating an alternate version of the original. A mashup, on the other hand, involves the combination of two or more works that may be very different from one another. In this article, I will apply these terms both to content remixes and mashups, which originated as a music form but now could describe the mixing of any number of digital media sources, and to data mashups, which combine the data and functionalities of two or more Web applications.
  • Electronic transmission has already inspired a new concept of multiple-authorship responsibility in which the specific concepts of the composer, the performer, and, indeed, the consumer overlap. . . . In fact, implicit in electronic culture is an acceptance of the idea of multilevel participation in the creative process.2
  • It is common to assume that remakes or reworkings are inherently lesser forms of creation than something that is "original" and that free reuse somehow degrades the value of the source. Modern copyright law and the intense social stigma associated with a term such as plagiarism speak to such assumptions.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • In his recent Harper's article "The Ecstasy of Influence," the novelist Jonathan Lethem imaginatively reviews the history of appropriation and recasts it as essential to the act of creation.3
  • He asserts that visual, sound, and text collage "might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first."
  • Lethem concludes: "Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses."
  • It's no mere coincidence that the rise of modernist genres using collage techniques and more fragmented structures accompanied the emergence of photography and audio recording. Reading Walter Benjamin's highly influential 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"4 it's clear that the profound effects of reproductive technology were obvious at that time. As Gould argued in 1964 (influenced by theorists such as Marshall McLuhan5), changes in how art is produced, distributed, and consumed in the electronic age have deep effects on the character of the art itself.
  • The result has been a flood of work created by largely anonymous media artists who are reimagining the iconography of popular culture, unearthing forgotten artifacts and contextualizing them anew. One only has to spend an hour surfing YouTube.com to get a sense of the subversive fun being had by hundreds of thousands of culture mashers.6
  • he statement "users will never add metadata" was becoming a mantra at gatherings of increasingly frustrated learning object promoters (again, I was often present) and when most learning object repositories were floundering, resource-sharing services such as del.icio.us and Flickr were enjoying phenomenal growth, with their user communities eagerly contributing heaps of useful metadata via simple folksonomy-oriented tagging systems.
  • Educators might justifiably argue that their materials are more authoritative, reliable, and instructionally sound than those found on the wider Web, but those materials are effectively rendered invisible and inaccessible if they are locked inside course management systems.
  • It's a dirty but open secret that many courses in private environments use copyrighted third-party materials in a way that pushes the limits of fair use—third-party IP is a big reason why many courses cannot easily be made open.
  • Pageflakes (http://www.pageflakes.com/), another RSS-based personal portal, supports a number of education-specific templates for tracking grades and displaying class schedules along with resources; pages with such sensitive information can also be made private.13
  • nother Pipe that Hirst has created is the "OpenLearn Unit Outlinks Search Hub Pipe," which extracts "all the outgoing links from a course unit, then feeds these into a Yahoo Search pipe, which uses the domains as search limits for the search."20 In other words, this Pipe can create a filtered search of trusted domains that are relevant to a particular course, and the filtered search will adjust automatically as new links are added to the course materials. Of course, this added functionality requires open content and a reusable data format in order to work properly.
  • If the course unit in question is locked away in a course management system behind a password firewall, Pipes cannot access the data required to create the customized search. As with content remixing, open access to materials is not just a matter of some charitable impulse to share knowledge with the world; it is a core requirement for participating in some of the most exciting and innovative activity on the Web.
  • . Working with the Scottish students they could then find out the stories behind these artefacts and create a Google Map which tracks these stories geographically, historically and anecdotally."21
  • All too often, college and university administrators react to this type of innovation with suspicion and outright hostility rather than cooperation. Witness the recent case at Harvard, where students, frustrated with the quality of the official institutional Web portal, decided to build their own portal, entitled Crimson Connect (http://www.crimsonconnect.com/), using RSS feeds and, for the most part, existing free software tools. University officials responded by demanding the removal of material that had been syndicated from password-protected course pages.25
  • those of us in higher education who observe the successful practices in the wider Web world have an obligation to consider and discuss how we might apply these lessons in our own contexts. We might ask if the content we presently lock down could be made public with a license specifying reasonable terms for reuse. When choosing a content management system, we might consider how well it supports RSS syndication.
  • Two of my favorite YouTube clips are the remix of The Shining's trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVjl7gK4HGU) and the mashup of the original Star Trek TV series with a Monty Python song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEnyT0_BjxA). These two videos themselves illustrate the difference between a remix and a mashup.
Barbara Lindsey

Wikis and Podcasts and Blogs! Oh, My! What Is a Faculty Member Supposed to Do? (EDUCAUS... - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...44993

blogs education educause highered podcasts web 2.0 wikis

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 03 Oct 08 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 03 Oct 08
     
    Thanks to Yesenia Hernandez on Diigo: Great discussion of the challenges, opps, institutional framework for higher ed web 2.0 integration.
Barbara Lindsey

On Making Sausage (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE CONNECT - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...47454

educause copyright filesharing criminal higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 17 Dec 08 - Cached
  • Buried within the 1,200 well-intentioned, time- and money-wasting pages are a couple of provisions related to copyright infringement on campus networks.
  • The second provision targeting traffic on college and university networks requires all campuses to certify that they (a) have “developed plans to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including through the use of a variety of technology-based deterrents” and (b) “will, to the extent practicable, offer alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property.”4
  • “Infringement of copyrighted works on university networks is a serious issue. However, a Federal policy that promotes or requires filtering will indirectly add to the costs of education and university research, introduce new security and privacy issues, degrade existing rights under copyright, and have little or no lasting impact on infringement of copyrighted works.”6
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • the earliest emergence of detailed rules implementing the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 is likely to be July 1, 2010.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 17 Dec 08
     
    Description of the negative impact of the 2008 Higher Ed Opportunity Act and the new policing role universities must take on to stop students from file sharing.
Barbara Lindsey

Foreign Language Faculty in the Age of Web 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...163095

educause web2.0 highered faculty languages

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 06 Dec 09 - Cached
  • graduate students interested in becoming acquainted with relevant instructional technologies have a limited number of options. Few graduate programs include such training as a part of the curriculum. As a matter of fact, pedagogy itself often represents a negligible fraction of graduate program requirements. The University of Minnesota offers excellent training through its summer institutes,4 but access is an issue. Most IT departments offer training sessions on how to use the university course management system, build a web page, or create a PowerPoint presentation, but technical training is not enough.
  • Today, language centers are the only campus units where such a wide range of expertise can easily be found.
  • The role of language technologists goes beyond teaching what a blog is and how to set up a browser to display Japanese characters. It includes sorting through novel technologies, evaluating their instructional potential, researching current educational uses, and sharing findings with educators. The most promising applications available today were not designed for instructional use and do not come with an instruction manual. To use them in the classroom requires the ability to redirect their intended purpose and, more importantly, to think through possible consequences of doing so.
Barbara Lindsey

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUC... - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...162420

seelybrown openeducation educause

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 10 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning. What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.5
  • The openness of Wikipedia is instructive in another way: by clicking on tabs that appear on every page, a user can easily review the history of any article as well as contributors’ ongoing discussion of and sometimes fierce debates around its content, which offer useful insights into the practices and standards of the community that is responsible for creating that entry in Wikipedia. (In some cases, Wikipedia articles start with initial contributions by passionate amateurs, followed by contributions from professional scholars/researchers who weigh in on the “final” versions. Here is where the contested part of the material becomes most usefully evident.) In this open environment, both the content and the process by which it is created are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind of critical reading—almost a new form of literacy—that invites the reader to join in the consideration of what information is reliable and/or important.
  • viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field. This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • A very different sort of initiative that is using technology to leverage social learning is Digital StudyHall (DSH), which is designed to improve education for students in schools in rural areas and urban slums in India.
  • many students in the United States and in many other parts of the world are already involved with online social networks that include their friends. John King, the associate provost of the University of Michigan, has attempted to bring attention to this phenomenon by asking how many students are being taught each year by his institution. Although about 40,000 students are enrolled in classes on the university’s campus in Ann Arbor, King believes that the actual number of students being reached by the school today is closer to 250,000.13
  • Through these continuing connections, the University of Michigan students can extend the discussions, debates, bull sessions, and study groups that naturally arise on campus to include their broader networks. Even though these extended connections were not developed to serve educational purposes, they amplify the impact that the university is having while also benefiting students on campus.14 If King is right, it makes sense for colleges and universities to consider how they can leverage these new connections through the variety of social software platforms that are being established for other reasons.
  • Hands-On Universe (HOU) is also designed to promote collaborative learning in astronomy (http://www.handsonuniverse.org). Based at the Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley, HOU invites students to request observations from professional observatories and provides them with image-processing software to visualize and analyze their data, encouraging interaction between the students and scientists. According to Kyle Cudworth, the science director at Yerkes Observatory, which is part of the HOU network: “This is not education in which people come in and lecture in a classroom. We’re helping students work with real data.”16
  • the emphasis is on building a community of students and scholars as much as on providing access to educational content.
  • longtail
  • The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments
  • The site serves as an apprenticeship platform for students by allowing them to observe how scholars in the field argue with each other and also to publish their own contributions, which can be relatively small—an example of the “legitimate peripheral participation” that is characteristic of open source communities. This allows students to “learn to be,” in this instance by participating in the kind of rigorous argumentation that is generated around a particular form of deep scholarship. A community like this, in which students can acculturate into a particular scholarly practice, can be seen as a virtual “spike”: a highly specialized site that can serve as a global resource for its field.
  • An example of such a practicum is the online Teaching and Learning Commons (http://commons.carnegiefoundation.org/) launched earlier this year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
  • The Commons is an open forum where instructors at all levels (and from around the world) can post their own examples and can participate in an ongoing conversation about effective teaching practices, as a means of supporting a process of “creating/using/re-mixing (or creating/sharing/using).”20
  • We are entering a world in which we all will have to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis.
  • Light discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students’ success in higher education—more important than the details of their instructors’ teaching styles—was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. Students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own.6
  • We need to construct shared, distributed, reflective practicums in which experiences are collected, vetted, clustered, commented on, and tried out in new contexts.
  • We now need a new approach to learning—one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up an inventory of knowledge in students’ heads.
Barbara Lindsey

A Sense of Purpose (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...WeschInterview

wesch educause interview pedagogy

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Bayne: You are one of the most active practitioners of teaching in the cloud. How can teaching in the cloud foster collaborative learning and collective intelligence?Wesch: I often like to think of the quote from Kevin Kelly, who says: "Nobody is as smart as everybody." That hangs in my head every time I go into a classroom. I look at the classroom. I look at the students. I start to think about who they are. Throughout the semester, I learn more and more about who they are, and it becomes increasingly evident to me that with all the intelligence and life experiences that they have, they are collectively much smarter than I am alone. Then the goal becomes trying to somehow harness all of that. And I think I've finally found the "secret sauce." It basically comes down to approaching the students as collaborators, co producers, co researchers, or whatever you want to call them — but not as students. So you take away that hierarchy.
  • pointing out to them that whatever we do is going to contribute to the real world. We're not just going to be hiding behind the classroom walls and doing our own thing.
  • "What does the world need from us? What can we do?" Given the topic at hand, we start mining the literature, trying to find holes in the literature or debates in the literature, things that we can help resolve, some way that we can contribute to the discourse. The main point is that we do it. It's all about the doing of it. While we're doing this, while we're going out and researching together and learning together, it's almost as if the learning happens accidentally.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It struck me the other day when we were in class: we spent the whole class, like we do every class, on the edge of our seats; everybody was leaning forward, brainstorming, trying to solve various problems in our current project. Everybody is deeply engaged in all of it. And at the end of the class, somebody mentioned: "Isn't it funny that we get three credits for this?" I go into this classroom thinking: "This is an exciting research group. We're doing really exciting research right now." It is a class, but you almost forget that it's a class.Bayne: That speaks to a certain sort of naturalism.Wesch: That's exactly what it's about, right? When it's completely real and relevant and when what we're doing matters, the learning becomes authentic and natural. It's so much fun to do that. It creates an environment in which the students themselves are thinking about harnessing collective intelligence, because they also recognize their peers as collaborators.Bayne: Your students tend to work in groups a lot, working as a team. How do you assess individual students?Wesch: To me, the art of encouraging collaboration is like trying to find that balance between assigning individual responsibility and also finding a way to leverage all the individual contributions in a way that the endpoint is greater than the sum of its parts. The way I do that — sort of the secret behind it all — is that even though it looks like group work, every student has his or her own, very specific role and assignment in that group. A lot of that is self-constructed, so that the students are developing their own project within the larger project. That self-guided piece creates more motivation and also ultimately creates a better product, because they know better than I do what their expertise is and how they can contribute.In all of my projects, there is an individually graded piece. Every student keeps his or her own research blog. All of those blogs are aggregated into a single feed that anybody can check out. It becomes like a learning diary. I can see what they've learned and what they've contributed over time. It's the same on the wiki: the wiki is a collaborative tool, but the wiki also tracks exactly what every individual contributes.The final video project that we create will be a fifty-minute documentary, but it will be made up of sixteen projects, each one of which will be about five minutes long. Each will be individually graded. Then I'll pick the best or the most relevant to create the final fifty-minute documentary. So every student walks an individual path while at the same time contributing to the whole.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 01 Dec 09
     
    An interview with Asst. Prof Michael Wesch
Wessam Abedelaziz

Curricula Designed to Meet 21st-Century Expectations | Resources | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...6065

expectations implementation student technology educause 21st-century

shared by Wessam Abedelaziz on 27 Oct 08 - Cached
  • W here students had once called a large number of their classes "death by lecture," she noted they were now calling them "death by PowerPoint." >
  • here students had once called a large number of their classes "death by lecture," she noted they were now calling them "death by PowerPoint."
    • Wessam Abedelaziz
      Wessam Abedelaziz on 31 Oct 08
       
      I think it is ' death by Powerpoint" is a good phrase as it automatically turns to a lecture form with the help of some slides. It is still boring if it is not mainpulated and being directed to be used effectively.
  • With such specific applications of technology and the limited use of other forms (for example, multimedia), students' low expectations for the use of technology in the curriculum is not surprising. Such constrained use of technology by the faculty in the curriculum and low student expectations may serve to limit innovation and creativity as well as the faculty's capacity to engage students more deeply in their subject matter. Like all organizations, colleges and universities respond to the demands placed upon them. Students' and institutions' low expectations for the use of technology for learning provide insufficient impetus for faculties to change their behavior and make broader, more innovative use of these tools in the service of learning.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Data obtained from these sessions with high school and college seniors in Indiana, Oregon, and Virginia
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 08
       
      Not representative sample
  • From the beginning, however, a problem arose in that those middle school students went on to high schools and later to colleges that did not (and do not) provide this type of rich learning experience—a learning experience that can best be achieved when technology is used in the service of learning.
  • Less attention has been given to how to help students achieve the desired learning outcomes through technology.
  • comparatively little support has been devoted to helping faculty use computers and other technologies in creative and innovative ways to deepen student learning.
  • institutional structures and practices to resolve technical problems that faculty invariably encounter are very limited or are not the type of aid needed. Such lack of support limits the amount of time faculty can spend on what they do best—building a compelling curriculum and integrating technology for more powerful learning.
  • To develop intentional learners, the curriculum must go beyond helping students gain knowledge for knowledge's sake to engaging students in the construction of knowledge for the sake of addressing the challenges faced by a complex, global society.
  • integrating study abroad into courses back on the home campus;
  • Consider this scenario:
  • Faculty concerns perhaps center less on being "replaceable" and more on worrying that the teaching and learning enterprise will be reduced to students gathering information that can be easily downloaded, causing them to rely too heavily on technology instead of intellect.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 08
       
      Mentioned frequently by our group members.
  • First, traditional age students overwhelmingly prefer face-to-face contact with faculty to mediated communication. Second, technology used in the service of learning will require more—not less—sophistication on the part of students as they engage in processes of integration, translation, audience analysis, and critical judgment.
  • Faculty with expertise in one or more subjects, who have been exposed to what we know about how people learn, can determine how to enhance this learning through the use of technology. But simply understanding how to use technology will not provide the integration needed to reach the desired learning outcomes.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 08
       
      Last sentence here most important.
  • There is a need for integrating technology that is in the service of learning throughout the curriculum. More intentional use of technology to capture what students know and are able to integrate in their learning is needed.
Barbara Lindsey

7 Things You Should Know About Telepresence | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...179124

educause telepresence videoconferencing

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 19 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 19 Jan 10
     
    Telepresence refers to the application of complex video technologies to give geographically separated participants a sense of being together in the same location. These systems use high-definition cameras feeding to life-size, HD displays with high-fidelity acoustics that, in many cases, localize sound to image, simulating the effect of each voice coming from the video display for each participant. In sophisticated telepresence rooms, the furniture and displays are arranged in ways that further enhance the simulation-participants sit at a conference table and see high-resolution video of participants in remote locations at similar tables, allowing participants to imagine sharing a single table. Costs can be an obstacle, but as these systems become more affordable, they have the potential to open new kinds of shared instruction and provide a legitimate alternative to in-person meetings
Barbara Lindsey

Foreign Language Faculty in the Age of Web 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...163095

faculty higher ed technology MLA pedagogy

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 03 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Adequate training is needed to help spread good practices and to better prepare graduate students for the needs of the current job market and of the job itself. In addition to enhancing teaching and learning, technology literacy will allow future faculty to better connect with a generation of undergraduate students that depends largely on technology to function on a daily basis. As a matter of fact, a recent MLA report on the status of foreign language instruction in higher education3 underscored that most incoming foreign language faculty would be teaching at the undergraduate level. The report calls for the integration of technology training in the graduate curriculum, asking departments to "take the necessary steps to teach graduate students to use technology in language instruction and learning." The report, which called for drastic transformations of foreign language academic programs nationwide, also emphasized the importance of providing graduate students with a good pedagogical basis.
Barbara Lindsey

7 Things You Should Know About QR Codes | EDUCAUSE CONNECT - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...48210

qr codes educause 7things

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 26 Mar 09 - Cached
  • QR codes are two-dimensional bar codes that can contain any alphanumeric text and that often feature URLs that direct users to sites where they can learn about an object or place (a practice known as “mobile tagging”).
  • The greatest importance of QR codes could lie not in their specific use but in the opportunities they offer for moving away from keyboards as input devices in learning environments.
  • providing on-the-spot access to descriptive language and online resources for objects and locations.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 26 Mar 09
     
    QR codes are two-dimensional bar codes that can contain any alphanumeric text and that often feature URLs that direct users to sites where they can learn about an object or place (a practice known as "mobile tagging").
Nicole McClure

Learning Spaces | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...6072

shared by Nicole McClure on 07 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Over the past decade, higher education has invested millions of dollars in classroom technology. The addition of document cameras, DVD players, Internet access, and projectors (to name a few) has added new functionality to the classroom. It is now possible to bring much more diverse materials to the classroom, to present them in a variety of ways, and to devise new classroom activities for students. As a result, the concept of the classroom has expanded to include this set of new functions.
    • Nicole McClure
      Nicole McClure on 07 Nov 08
       
      I think it's interesting that putting some tech in the room makes it "new." Classrooms have always had new technology (relative to the time of course), but having a group of students stare at a projection screen is not that different than having them stare at a person. I'm more interested in the "new" classrooms that challenge the idea of space altogether.
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