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it has made the work of educational administrators exponentially more difficult. Students now talk, up and down the years, via the recorded ratings on the site. It isn’t possible for an institution of higher education to disguise an individual who happens to be a world-class researcher but a rather ordinary lecturer. In earlier times, schools could foist these instructors on students, who’d be stuck for a semester. This no longer happens, because RateMyProfessors.com effectively warns students away from the poor-quality teachers.

This one site has undone all of the neat work of tenure boards and department chairs throughout the entire world of academia.

The battle for control over who stands in front of the classroom has now been decisively lost by the administration in favor of the students.

That knowledge, once pooled, takes on a life of its own, and finds itself in places where it has uses that its makers never intended.

If we are smart enough, we can learn a lesson here and now that we will eventually learn – rather more expensively – if we wait. The lesson is simple: control is over. This is not about control anymore. This is about finding a way to survive and thrive in chaos.

the shape of things to come. But there are some other trends which are also becoming visible. The first and most significant of these is the trend toward sharing lecture material online, so that it reaches a very large audience.

the possibility that some individuals or group of individuals might create their own context around the lectures. And this is where the future seems to be pointing.

When broken down to its atomic components, the classroom is an agreement between an instructor and a set of students. The instructor agrees to offer expertise and mentorship, while the students offer their attention and dedication. The question now becomes what role, if any, the educational institution plays in coordinating any of these components. Students can share their ratings online – why wouldn’t they also share their educational goals? Once they’ve pooled their goals, what keeps them from recruiting their own instructor, booking their own classroom, indeed, just doing it all themselves?

Why not create a new kind of “Open University”, a website that offers nothing but the kinds of scheduling and coordination tools students might need to organize their own courses?

In this near future world, students are the administrators.

Now since most education is funded by the government, there will obviously be other forces at play; it may be that “administration”, such as it is, represents the government oversight function which ensures standards are being met. In any case, this does not look much like the educational institution of the 20th century – though it does look quite a bit like the university of the 13th century, where students would find and hire instructors to teach them subjects.

The lecturer now helps the students find the material available online, and helps them to make sense of it, contextualizing and informing their understanding. even as the students continue to work their way through the ever-growing set of information. The instructor can not know everything available online on any subject, but will be aware of the best (or at least, favorite) resources, and will pass along these resources as a key outcome of the educational process. The instructor facilitates and mentors, as they have always done, but they are no longer the gatekeepers, because there are no gatekeepers,

The classroom in this fungible future of student administrators and evolved lecturers is any place where learning happens.

At one end of the scale, students will be able work online with each other and with an lecturer to master material; at the other end, students will work closely with a mentor in a specialist classroom. This entire range of possibilities can be accommodated without much of the infrastructure we presently associate with educational institutions. The classroom will both implode – vanishing online – and explode – the world will become the classroom.

Flexibility and fluidity are the hallmark qualities of the 21st century educational institution. An analysis of the atomic features of the educational process shows that the course is a series of readings, assignments and lectures that happen in a given room on a given schedule over a specific duration. In our drive to flexibility how can we reduce the class into to essential, indivisible elements? How can we capture those elements? Once captured, how can we get these elements to the students? And how can the students share elements which they’ve found in their own studies?

This is the basic idea that’s guiding Stanford and MIT: recording is cheap, lecturers are expensive, and students are forgetful. Somewhere in the middle these three trends meet around recorded media. Yes, a student at Stanford who misses a lecture can download and watch it later, and that’s a good thing. But it also means that any student, anywhere, can download the same lecture.

Every one of these recordings has value, and the more recordings you have, the larger the horde you’re sitting upon. If you think of it like that – banking your work – the logic of capturing everything becomes immediately clear.

While education definitely has value – teachers are paid for the work – that does not mean that resources, once captured, should be tightly restricted to authorized users only. In fact, the opposite is the case: the resources you capture should be shared as broadly as can possibly be managed. More than just posting them onto a website (or YouTube or iTunes), you should trumpet their existence from the highest tower. These resources are your calling card, these resources are your recruiting tool.

the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. You extend your brand with every resource you share. You extend the knowledge of your institution throughout the Internet. Whatever you have – if it’s good enough – will bring people to your front door, first virtually, then physically.

Stanford and MIT

show a different way to value education – as experience. You can’t download experience. You can’t bottle it. Experience has to be lived, and that requires a teacher.

Rather than going for a commercial solution, I would advise you to look at the open-source solutions. Rather than buying a solution, use Moodle, the open-source, Australian answer to digital courseware. Going open means that as your needs change, the software can change to meet those needs. Given the extraordinary pressures education will be under over the next few years, openness is a necessary component of flexibility.

Openness is also about achieving a certain level of device-independence.

here are many screens today, and while the laptop screen may be the most familiar to educators, the mobile handset has a screen which is, in many ways, more vital. Many students will never be very computer literate, but every single one of them has a mobile handset, and every single one of them sends text messages. It’s the big of computer technology we nearly always overlook – because it is so commonplace. Consider every screen when you capture, and when you share; dealing with them all as equals will help you work find audiences you never suspected you’d have.

Yet net filtering throws the baby out with the bathwater. Services like Twitter get filtered out because they could potentially be disruptive, cutting students off from the amazing learning potential of social messaging. Facebook and MySpace are seen as time-wasters, rather than tools for organizing busy schedules. The list goes on: media sites are blocked because the schools don’t have enough bandwidth to support them; Wikipedia is blocked because teachers don’t want students cheating. All of this has got to stop. The classroom does not exist in isolation, nor can it continue to exist in opposition to the Internet. Filtering, while providing a stopgap, only leaves students painfully aware of how disconnected the classroom is from the real world. Filtering makes the classroom less flexible and less responsive. Filtering is lazy.

Mind the maxim of the 21st century: connection is king. Students must be free to connect with instructors, almost at whim. This becomes difficult for instructors to manage, but it is vital. Mentorship has exploded out of the classroom and, through connectivity, entered everyday life.

Finally, students must be free to (and encouraged to) connect with their peers. Part of the reason we worry about lecturers being overburdened by all this connectivity is because we have yet to realize that this is a multi-lateral, multi-way affair. It’s not as though all questions and issues immediately rise to the instructor’s attention. This should happen if and only if another student can’t be found to address the issue. Students can instruct one another, can mentor one another, can teach one another. All of this happens already in every classroom; it’s long past time to provide the tools to accelerate this natural and effective form of education.

Connection is expensive, not in dollars, but in time. But for all its drawbacks, connection enriches us enormously. It allows us to multiply our reach, and learn from the best.

learning by listening is proved to be much harder than learning by reading.

RateMyProfessors is a good start, and anecdotes about how people use it is interesting, but it has a long long way to go before it comes close to being reliable let alone authoritative.

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.

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.

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).

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).

Humanities 7.7% 47.9% 40.2

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

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

we found that many of the students most skilled in the use of technology had mixed feelings about technology in the classroom.

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."

fundamental presumption is one of endless information abundance.

micromarkets

Flickr, YouTube

multiple demographics

Abundance leads to immediate context and fact checking, which changes the "authority market" substantially. The ability to participate in most online experiencesvia comments, votes, or ratingsis now presumed, and when it's not available, it's missed.

Web 2.0 is all about responding to abundance, which is a shift of profound significance.

Chefs simply couldn't exist in a world of universal scarcity

a time when scholarship, and how we make it available, will be affected by information abundance just as powerfully as food preparation has been.

Scholarly communication before the Internet required the intermediation of publishers. The costliness of publishing became an invisible constraint that drove nearly all of our decisions. It became the scholar's job to be a selector and interpreter of difficult-to-find primary and secondary sources; it was the scholarly publisher's job to identify the best scholars with the best perspective and the best access to scarce resources.

Google

Google

Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote, by Page A, for Page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important,'"

if scholarly output is locked away behind fire walls, or on hard drives, or in print only, it risks becoming invisible to the automated Web crawlers, indexers, and authority-interpreters that are being developed. Scholarly invisibility is rarely the path to scholarly authority.

The challenge for all those sites pertains to abundance:

It has its limits, but it also both confers and confirms authority because people tend to point to authoritative sources to bolster their own work.

Such systems have not been framed to confer authority, but as they devise means to deal with predators, scum, and weirdos wanting to be a "friend," they are likely to expand into "trust," or "value," or "vouching for my friend" metrics — something close to authority — in the coming years.

ecently some more "authoritative" editors have been given authority to override whining ax grinders.

In many respects Boing Boing is an old-school edited resource. It doesn't incorporate feedback or comments, but rather is a publication constructed by five editor-writers

As the online environment matures, most social spaces in many disciplines will have their own "boingboings."

That kind of democratization of authority is nearly unique to wikis that are group edited, since not observation, but active participation in improvement, is the authority metric.

user-generated authority, many of which are based on algorithmic analysis of participatory engagement. The emphasis in such models is often not on finding scarce value, but on weeding abundance

They differ from current models mostly by their feasible computability in a digital environment where all elements can be weighted and measured, and where digital interconnections provide computable context.

In the very near future, if we're talking about a universe of hundreds of billions of documents, there will routinely be thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of documents that are very similar to any new document published on the Web. If you are writing a scholarly article about the trope of smallpox in Shakespearean drama, how do you ensure you'll be read? By competing in computability. Encourage your friends and colleagues to link to your online document. Encourage online back-and-forth with interested readers. Encourage free access to much or all of your scholarly work. Record and digitally archive all your scholarly activities. Recognize others' works via links, quotes, and other online tips of the hat. Take advantage of institutional repositories, as well as open-access publishers. The list could go on.

the new authority metrics, instead of relying on scholarly publishers to establish the importance of material for them.

cholarly publishers

They need to play a role in deciding not just what material will be made available online, but also how the public will be allowed to interact with the material. That requires a whole new mind-set.

Many of the values of scholarship are not well served yet by the Web: contemplation, abstract synthesis, construction of argument.

Traditional models of authority will probably hold sway in the scholarly arena for 10 to 15 years, while we work out the ways in which scholarly engagement and significance can be measured in new kinds of participatory spaces.

Online scholarly publishing in Web 1.0 mimicked those fundamental conceptions. The presumption was that information scarcity still ruled. Most content was closed to nonsubscribers; exceedingly high subscription costs for specialty journals were retained; libraries continued to be the primary market; and the "authoritative" version was untouched by comments from the uninitiated. Authority was measured in the same way it was in the scarcity world of paper: by number of citations to or quotations from a book or article, the quality of journals in which an article was published, the institutional affiliation of the author, etc.

Authority 3.0 will probably include (the list is long, which itself is a sign of how sophisticated our new authority makers will have to be): Prestige of the publisher (if any). Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any). Prestige of commenters and other participants. Percentage of a document quoted in other documents. Raw links to the document. Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered. Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion. Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted. Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what's its authority status? Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community. Quality of author's institutional affiliation(s). Significance of author's other work. Amount of author's participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc. Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read. Length of time a document has existed. Inclusion of a document in lists of "best of," in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations. Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

Most technophile thinkers out there believe that Web 3.0 will be driven by artificial intelligences — automated computer-assisted systems that can make reasonable decisions on their own, to preselect, precluster, and prepare material based on established metrics, while also attending very closely to the user's individual actions, desires, and historic interests, and adapting to them.

Academics and their institutions have sold out to economic interests in the name of preserving the only system trustworthy enough to produce authoritative information.

I believe it is fair to label as “apartheid” any artificial social construct that privileges an elite minority to the detriment of a majority. The artificial construct doing that in the world of knowledge is the toll-access system of traditional scholarly communication.

Despite all the digitizing and online publishing now extant, despite the proliferation of websites and web users, despite the largely up-to-date technological infrastructure within academia, it is still the case that most of the world’s most important knowledge remains out of reach of most of the world. Keep that simple fact central in your mind as I revisit the mission statements of universities and academic presses that purport to promote scholarship for the general benefit of humankind.

“The mission of a university press,” said Daniel Coit Gilman, President of Johns Hopkins University in 1880, “is to assist the university in fulfilling its noble mission ‘to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures—but far and wide.'" Universities and academic publishers are ostensibly dedicated to the very opposite of keeping people and knowledge apart. And yet, they do.

You really don’t need to go to the developing world to recognize that advanced knowledge is a big club with stiff entrance fees. Even middle class Americans will think twice before throwing down $30 for a scholarly article. How likely will this knowledge ever reach scholars in Mexico or India? And just how broadly can the editors of Subjectivity expect it to reach when subscribing costs $503/year?

Academic authors, editors, publishers, and distributors are simply not in the business of reaching the masses; they are in the business of reaching other specialists.

Academia banks on Intellectual Apartheid; its knowledge economy only rewards specialists publishing to specialists. In such a world, the “influence” of scholarship is not often correlated to real-world effects; it is usually correlated to how well a given work contributes to the specialist knowledge economy. Citation indexes measure reputations among specialists; “impact factor” relates not to real-world impact, but to reputation within the closed system.

one of the great secrets of academic publishing

academia could care less about whether anything its scholars do actually makes a difference in the world, except for the occasional puff piece to show to contributors or alumni. Reaching out to the whole world is the stuff that convocation speeches and university mission statements are made of, but in the day-to-day world of academia, actually reaching the world with one’s refined knowledge is not rewarded. In fact, it is often punished. Generalists, such as those who are using blogging to actually talk to the public about their ideas, are threatened with lack of tenure or advancement if they waste their time in anything but publications oriented towards their disciplinary peers.

A university’s reward system requires its faculty to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed journals serve the purpose of authenticating knowledge, but at the same time they also wall in that knowledge by making it available only to those willing to pay for it.

There is an assumption that if something is “published” (meaning published in a conventional, peer-reviewed journal), then it is appropriately circulating and available.

It may be “circulating” among subscribers (a few hundred), but it is simultaneously being kept from the online public (a few billion).

Essentially, scholars whose work is measured in terms of how often their articles are cited within peer-reviewed literature demonstrate not so much the actual worth or impact of their ideas as they demonstrate their fidelity to a closed knowledge economy. Impact factor statistics are really loyalty points for the gentlemen's club: if you impressed other members of the club, you get to stay in it. If you try for other audiences--like the one's loftily imagined in university mission statements--you show disloyalty to the club.

scholars underestimate the value and influence of their work, voluntarily giving up what their work might mean and do if circulating among a public that is literally six or seven orders of magnitude larger in size that the subscriber base of the most used journals. And it's a shame that broader, open, multi-disciplinary review is considered inferior to one-time assessment by two or three experts. Can we really be sure that conventional peer-reviewed knowledge is as reliable as it pretends to be when its adherents resist transparency and the checks and balances of exposing this knowledge more broadly?

I call upon you to join me in a full divestment from intellectual apartheid.

Here's how each academic stakeholder can fight Intellectual Apartheid: Scholars: Publish your work in Open Access journals or arrange open access for publications in conventional journals. Use Creative Commons licensing (rather than signing away copyright) in order to preserve access to your own work Deposit your publications in institutional or disciplinary archives to ensure permanent open access and the broadest exposure to search engines. Refuse to peer-review manuscripts or serve in editorial capacities for any journal that does not accommodate open access. Cancel subscriptions to toll-access scholarship Wean yourself from using any research materials that an everyday person from a developing country wouldn't have full access to via the Internet

In training students, patrons, and faculty, teach them more about how and why to use open access resources rather than how to use expensive proprietary databases and services. Work with administrators to educate faculty about the benefits of open access publishing and rights management.

Administrators Create a university-wide mandate (as Harvard has done), requiring faculty to retain copyright of their scholarship and to license the non-exclusive depositing of that scholarship in the institutional archive. Update promotion and tenure policies to favor open access publications and to accommodate evolving scholarly genres (such as data sets, software, and scholarly tools that build the cyberinfrastructure). Require chairs and deans to educate faculty on evolving academic publishing models and to ready their conversion to using and publishing open access scholarship.

“There’s a sense that those who define the standard haven’t caught on yet,” he said.

His polling also points to other challenges that colleges will face as they race to serve a worldwise generation of 18-to-29-year-olds that Mr. Zogby calls “First Globals.”

Only 27 percent of respondents agreed that “online universities and colleges provide the same quality of education” as traditional institutions. Among those 18 to 24 years old, only 23 percent agreed.

An even greater proportion of those polled said it was their perception that employers and academic professionals thought more highly of traditional institutions than online ones.

Yet in another national poll in December 2007, conducted for Excelsior College, 45 percent of the 1,004 adults surveyed believed “an online class carries the same value as a traditional-classroom class,” and 43 percent of 1,545 chief executives and small-business owners agreed that a degree earned by distance learning “is as credible” as one from a traditional campus-based program.

As with changing perceptions about other cultural phenomena, “these paradigm shifts really are moving at lightning speed.”

Mr. Zogby also highlights the emerging influence of the First Globals, whom his book calls “the most outward-looking and accepting generation in American history.” First Globals, he says, are more socially tolerant and internationally aware.

First Globals, he writes, who are shaping what he says is nothing short of a “fundamental reorientation of the American character away from wanton consumption and toward a new global citizenry in an age of limited resources.”

Data obtained from these sessions with high school and college seniors in Indiana, Oregon, and Virginia

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.

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.

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.

Said Veeramani: "There are ... some significant common drivers that academia is wrestling with: first, creating more effective learning outcomes for students and second, accommodating more students from a scalability standpoint. To accomplish this, institutions are increasingly turning to lecture capture technologies that turn a traditional classroom into an instant source of online, interactive content."

The room is nothing less than a state of the art information dump, a physical manifestation of the all too pervasive yet narrow and naïve assumption that to learn is simply to acquire information, built for teachers to effectively carry out the relatively simple task of conveying information. Its sheer size, layout, and technology are testaments to the efficiency and expediency with which we can now provide students with their required credit hours.

But the problems are not new. They are the same as those identified by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner nearly 40 years ago when they described the plight of “totally alienated students” involved in a cheating scandal

Texting, web-surfing, and iPods are just new versions of passing notes in class, reading novels under the desk, and surreptitiously listening to Walkmans.

Fortunately, they allow us to see the problem in a new way, and more clearly than ever, if we are willing to pay attention to what they are really saying.

Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation. In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.

Some time ago we started taking our walls too seriously – not just the walls of our classrooms, but also the metaphorical walls that we have constructed around our “subjects,” “disciplines,” and “courses.” McLuhan’s statement about the bewildered child confronting “the education establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules” still holds true in most classrooms today. The walls have become so prominent that they are even reflected in our language, so that today there is something called “the real world” which is foreign and set apart from our schools. When somebody asks a question that seems irrelevant to this real world, we say that it is “merely academic.” Not surprisingly, our students struggle to find meaning and significance inside these walls. They tune out of class, and log on to Facebook.

We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud (including almost any answer to almost any multiple choice question you can imagine). We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies.

When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.

One of the difficulties I find in teaching this way is that each semester I start from scratch. Students need to learn how to learn this way, just as they learned the passivity of the lecture hall over years. By the same token, we need to learn how to teach this way. It does mean changing the role of the teacher. It does mean a shift in the relationship between knowledge, student, and professor. There are difficult institutional-ideological issues coming from all sides there. As such, we are not just talking about changing teaching or learning practices but about changing institutional cultures.

And won’t you concede that there’s some things that simply need to be communicated and digested, period? Is there really a better collaborative, social-network paradigm for learning noun endings in Russian or the multiplication tables, or for how best to craft a sentence, which takes the human touch of a creative, talented teacher? Some things just have to be, uh, “learned,” memorized, practiced with pencil and paper, pen and pad.

For that very reason of “envelopment,” we need to preserve a few spaces on campus in which the cloud is dispelled and students must engage in the “old dynamics of knowledge”–if only as an exercise in mental flexibility. Shouldn’t we be concerned about what is lost as things have “shifted”?

“I agree with some of what he says, but I don’t think I would offer the implicit absolution to students that he does. How are they failing their educations? … Wesch seems to believe that if students are disengaged from the learning process, it’s the fault of the professoriat.”

If we assume that students can access information either before class (via textbooks, for instance) or during class as needed (via laptops and other devices), then we need not spend class time transmitting information to our students. We can, instead, spend precious class time helping students make sense of that information, taking advantage of the fact that class time is the only time when we’re all together (face-to-face, at least) to interact with each other around that information. One method of doing so that scales up very well to a class with hundreds of students (to address David Carson’s concern) is what Mazur calls “peer instruction” facilitated by a classroom response system (”clickers”). The teacher poses a challenging and interesting multiple-choice question. (There are such questions as Michael points out with his anecdote about a student “overthinking” a multiple-choice exam question.) The students think about the question and submit their answers using their clickers. If the results generated by the classroom response system show that there’s disagreement about the question (which is likely to happen if the question is sufficiently challenging), then the teacher instructs the students to discuss the question with their neighbors. After some time for this “peer instruction,” the students vote again with their clickers. Often, this second vote will show some convergence to the correct answer (provided the question has a single correct answer, which isn’t necessary). Either way, the stage is set for a productive classwide discussion of the question or a mini-lecture by the teacher.

I must admit that I enjoy teaching a large class of 400, many of whom enter the class for a requirement, because it gives me an opportunity to reach out to them with insights and transformative experiences that they are highly unlikely to stumble across in self-directed study. It also gives me a much more diverse group of people to work with and engage with in collaborative study, which can be much more powerful than simple self-directed study.

Are you right that “knowledge is made” in a “cloud of ubiquitous digital information”? Or, is this precisely one of anthropology’s significant contributions to the life of the mind, to a mindful life? Common sense cannot be trusted. Information, even in the highly evocative cloud-form, is *not* knowledge. Whatever knowledge is (i.e. as the philosopher’s ‘true justified belief ‘ or some even more exotic formulation), surely it is an actionable individual possession. The cloud is not knowledgeable, it is informational. And, I wonder how you might respond to a claim that our walls, the particular architectonics of the disciplines we work within, provide students with the conversational, narrative, cognitive, epistemological, methodological, ontological, the –ogical means for converting mere information into knowledge.

College faculty and IT staff agreed that a lack of technology know-how among professors is the biggest barrier to technology integration on campus. Although 85 percent of faculty members said their institutions provide some kind of technology training, 44 percent nevertheless said their biggest challenge is knowing how to use technology in their teaching.

But community colleges also lag in certain areas, the index suggests--including using social-networking tools to enhance faculty-student interaction and giving students access to their computer networks off campus.

there is an almost insatiable interest in factual information made available online

rbitrarily restricting access to factual information simply directs the flow around the institution restricting access. Britannica could be earning over a hundred million dollars a year from advertising revenue – that’s what it is projected that Wikipedia could earn, just from banner advertisements, if it ever accepted advertising. But Britannica chose to lock itself away from its audience.

under no circumstances do you take yourself off the network.

t seems as though many of our institutions are mired in older ways of thinking, where selfishness and protecting the collection are seen as a cardinal virtues. There’s a new logic operating: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes.

In a landmark settlement of a long-running copyright dispute with book publishers in the United States, Google agreed to pay a license fee to those publishers for their copyrights – even for books out of print. In return, the publishers are allowing Google to index, search and display all of the books they hold under copyright.

Each of these texts is indexed and searchable – just as with the books under copyright, but, in this case, the full text is available through Google’s book reader tool. For works under copyright but out-of-print, Google is now acting as the sales agent, translating document searches into book sales for the publishers, who may now see huge “long tail” revenues generated from their catalogues.

Since Google is available from every computer connected to the Internet (given that it is available on most mobile handsets, it’s available to nearly every one of the four billion mobile subscribers on the planet), this new library – at least seven million volumes – has become available everywhere. The library has become coextensive with the Internet.

When CD-ROM was introduced, twenty years ago, it was hailed as the “new papyrus,” capable of storing vast amounts of information in a richly hyperlinked format. As the limits of CD-ROM became apparent, the Web became the repository of the hopes of all the archivists and bibliophiles who dreamed of a new Library of Alexandria, a universal library with every text in every tongue freely available to all.

We have now gotten as close to that ideal as copyright law will allow;

For libraries, Google has established subscription-based fees for access to books covered by copyright.

Within another few years, every book within arm’s length of Google (and Google has many, many arms) will be scanned, indexed and accessible through books.google.com. This library can be brought to bear everywhere anyone sits down before a networked screen. This librar

The library has been obsolesced because it has become universal; the stacks have gone virtual, sitting behind every screen. Because the idea of the library has become so successful, so universal, it no longer means anything at all. We are all within the library.

The central task of the librarian – if I can be so bold as to state something categorically – is to bring order to chaos. The librarian takes a raw pile of information and makes it useful.

At its most visible, the book cataloging systems used in all libraries represents the librarian’s best efforts to keep an overwhelming amount of information well-managed and well-ordered.

Google seems to have abandoned – or ignored – library science in its own book project. I can’t tell you why this is, I can only tell you that it looks very foolish and naïve.

because the library is universal, library science now needs to be a universal skill set, more broadly taught than at any time previous to this. We have become a data-centric culture, and are presently drowning in data. It’s difficult enough for us to keep our collections of music and movies well organized; how can we propose to deal with collections that are a hundred thousand times larger?