Group items tagged

Proponents of the concept say it capitalizes on the benefits that both face-to-face and online learning can provide—and now, there is some evidence to suggest that hybrid courses can help students learn more effectively.

Though the sample size is too small to draw any definitive conclusions, it raises some interesting questions to explore more fully.

Universities are inherently conservative organizations. Perhaps Clark Kerr said it best when, after witnessing 20 years of social upheaval, he described universities’ deeply-rooted tendency toward stasis. In The Uses of the University, written in 1982 when he was chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, he wrote: “About 85 institutions in the Western world established by 1500 still exist in recognizable forms, with similar functions and unbroken histories, including the Catholic church, the Parliaments of the Isle of Man, of Iceland, and of Great Britain, several Swiss cantons, and 70 universities. Kings that rule, feudal lords with vassals, and guilds with monopolies are all gone. These seventy universities, however, are still in the same locations with some of the same buildings, with professors and students doing much the same things, and with governance carried on in much the same ways.”

A decade after the birth of the commercial Internet, a specter began to haunt the hallowed ivory halls of the university campus (and much else around the globe). The DNA of the Internet respects no boundaries, has little use for hierarchy, and flaunts the communication paradigm in which every message needs to have a messenger.

In the gold rush that followed the birth of modern computing, universities were among the few institutions to serve as checks on software companies’ attempts at control. Colleges around the globe invested in standards-based technologies and open-source solutions to prevent domination by any one entity.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this effort was the process. Each faculty member was assigned a technologist and a research librarian who, together, formed a “cluster.” These clusters supported the professors while they designed their syllabi, and the cluster members worked with both the students and the professor throughout the semester.

Our readings for this upcoming week’s meetings have all been chosen by you and your classmates in our FSEM workshop.

This well-selected item offers an analytical framework to consider and raises relevant questions for our discussion of the other articles and links listed below. Key themes include objects and toys, their relationship with the formation of identity, and our own explorations of the object, toys, and playthings that children (and adults) share.

Academia must divest from Intellectual Apartheid

I mean academia’s policy that enforces an unnecessary and counterproductive intellectual divide. What intellectual divide? It is that gaping chasm between two opposing models of disseminating knowledge: toll access and open access.

lack of access to technology (dubbed the "digital divide") seriously handicaps half the world's population. That is a giant problem but one being gradually ameliorated by mobile telephony and economic forces.

Media and legal experts create a code to help teachers and students understand fair use of copyrighted materials

Along with these five principles, the code lists common myths about fair use and provides the truth behind these myths. For example, it explains there are no "rules of thumb" for fair use, and that fair use is situational--and context is critical. Also, educators don't always have the last word on fair-use policy.

Results suggest that tolerance for ambiguity may be an important variable to assess and train so that students are better prepared for unstructured elements of a course that promote critical thinking and parallel the complexities of the applied world.

Although many other researchers have theorized that tolerance for ambiguity is associated with critical thinking, empirical evidence to support the relationship between tolerance for ambiguity and critical thinking is lacking (Murphy, 1999). Johnson, Court, Roersma & Kinnaman (1995) have suggested that instructors of undergraduate programs actively examine tolerance for ambiguity as an important element in development of flexible, integrative, and independent thinking.

Assessment of the relationship between comfort with ambiguity and affinity to structured elements of classroom teaching and evaluation seem important to address given the changing nature of the classroom environment.

"By making its inaugural higher education partnership with Duke, Ustream aims to help empower educational experiences across physical and financial boundaries,” said John Ham, Ustream’s chief executive officer. “We look forward to enabling Duke professors to reach students across the globe."

“Duke has a strong commitment to sharing its knowledge and expertise to serve society,” said Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations at Duke. “We’re using a growing number of new media platforms to invite the public to participate in the debates that animate our campus, on issues ranging from health care to foreign policy. These new services and programs make it possible for our faculty to connect with audiences around the world.”

The wikis include everything from test scheduling (internal) to early dismissal information (external).

"We've saved lots of money," Cohen said. "But the real drag of using [expensive collaboration products] was you have these elaborate systems; parents had to get accounts; you had to give vendors the students' names; there was lots of work just to get it to work."

With the Wikispaces, Cohen can just set the program up and have users do the work for him. Privacy concerns are minimal because the only publicly accessible information is the student's name and time of meeting,