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Barbara Lindsey

Foreign Language Faculty in the Age of Web 2.0 | Educationload.com - 0 views

educationload.com/?p=87

web 2.0 faculty foreignlanguage manuela

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Jan 09 - Cached
  • A keyword search for the word “tech%” and “computer” in the Modern Language Association (MLA) job list1 returns over 43 relevant ads out of 236 job postings (as of November 20, 2007): “familiarity with teaching-related technologies” (tenure track in Spanish, Missouri); “experience with technology in the classroom” (tenure track in French, Michigan); “ability to use technology effectively in teaching and learning” (tenure track in Japanese, South Carolina). The wording varies slightly from one ad to the next, but the message is the same: job candidates are well advised to have an answer ready when asked how they use technology in the classroom.
  • The history of educational technology in higher education provides ample support for the claim that technology should never outstrip pedagogy.
  • many Web 2.0 applications are powerful socialization and communication tools. As such, they have an incredible educational potential for foreign language instruction.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Sadly, this potential often fails to be realized because of the widespread belief that these tools are somehow inherently educational. The iPod might have an instructional potential, but it is the educators who arrange and structure instructional events around it to make learning happen, not the instrument itself. To realize the instructional potential of technology requires a set of skills that can only be acquired through adequate instruction and practice. Just as speaking a foreign language is not a qualification to teach it, knowing how to use a technology does not mean that one knows intuitively how to use it as a teaching tool.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Because the field of language technology is at the crossroads of technology, instructional design, and languages, it calls for the close collaboration of experts in each area. 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 on 28 Jan 09
     
    Technological skills and understanding how to employ Web 2.0 tools to successfully support pedagogy are vital for foreign language faculty today
Barbara Lindsey

Obama and Higher Education - Romance and Reality - HigherEd Careers - HigherEdJobs.com - 0 views

www.higheredjobs.com/...interviews.cfm

higher ed funding education tenure

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 May 09 - Cached
  • I don't expect direct subsidies for education will matter generally - especially in the humanities. Investments in science, technology, and health care will boost large research universities that depend on grants. The next 8 years will be good to scientists at MIT, Cal Tech, and Johns Hopkins, among others. Better to be a "real" scientist than a "social" scientist.
  • Faculty should expect less and less security. Major universities have been shifting away from tenured faculty toward lecturers - and that may well be a good trend. Lecturers tend to be closer to the "real world," which comes along with more practical skills. Likewise, growth in higher education will be greater in community and technical colleges. Job security there is directly related to performance - not tenure. We may, thankfully, be moving toward more accountability for teachers and less security for the dead wood among our faculties.
  • If you're looking for innovation and change in higher education , take a train to your state capitol building. Avoid that flight to DC.
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  • At Harvard, we're seeing fewer hires because of the economy, but when we do make hires, we're looking for cross-disciplinary scholars.
  • for my students I ask them to write skill-based resumes. Their job histories should be downplayed and woven into the skills they can bring to employers.
  • For other professors, I've seen a lot of my colleagues come and go from here. Those who have been successful (either at Harvard or at their next jobs) understand that their learning only begins when they get a Ph.D. Some of my friends from graduate school thought they had reached some "finish line" when they got their doctorates. That's crazy. That's the starting line. Scholars who have successful careers diversify their skills and interests. They keep up with journals while also trying to become more "public intellectuals." I think of it this way: even though we're not in a Ph.D. program any longer, we should imagine ourselves getting a new Ph.D. every six years. We're not just in the "teaching business," we're in the "learning business." As the world changes, we need to, too.
Barbara Lindsey

read-write web vs. academic publishing « an academic at work - 1 views

enzaac.wordpress.com/...ite-web-vs-academic-publishing

aroundtheworld beyondwebct education tenure web2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 27 Sep 08 - Cached
  • The question I have been pondering lately is this: What role does a read-write web platform play in the dossier of an academic?
  • ’ve been truly fortunate to have had a paper accepted by the official journal of the American Council for Foreign Language Educators, which has a circulation of approximately 10,000 subscriptions in membership and also has found in approximately 1000 libraries.
  • Now, let’s turn to the world of the read-write web. Perhaps I wouldn’t be able to determine with certainty how many people read it, but I could see how many views my article gets,
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  • Would any member of the administration of an American college or university consider the number of hits, favorites, downloads, etc. as valuable for a decision on hiring, tenure, promotion, recognition, etc.? I believe in the age of web 2.0, where social networking fosters an environment for sharing and transmitting knowledge (no longer limited to the ivory-tower library), we can’t ignore the importance of web views.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 27 Sep 08
     
    The question I have been pondering lately is this: What role does a read-write web platform play in the dossier of an academic?
Barbara Lindsey

Academic Evolution: Academia must divest from Intellectual Apartheid - 0 views

www.academicevolution.com/...intellectual-apartheid.html

publishing2.0 academy higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09 - Cached
  • 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.
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  • 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.
  • 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.
  • “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?
  • 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.
  • 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
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09
       
      What do you think about this statement? Who knows (and perpetuates) this secret, in your opinion?
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09
       
      Do you agree with this statement? If so, what does this mean for you and your academic future?
  • 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
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09
       
      What do you think?
  • 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.
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.
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  • 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."
Barbara Lindsey

digital digs: Richard Miller's MLA Dream - 1 views

www.alex-reid.net/...richard-millers-mla-dream.html

mla youtube humanities web2.0 teaching research

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Jan 09 - Cached
  • How long do we have before someone comes along and just imposes something or simply supplants us? 30 years? 20 years? Will it begin in as little as five or ten years? Think about Wall St and the auto industry before you answer.
  • A liberal arts college creates a digital humanities center. The center starts to get grants and increasingly becomes better funded by the institution. Faculty from across humanities departments interested in the digital become more closely tied to the center than to their departments. Humanities curriculum become increasingly driven by the Center. Hiring and tenuring priorities still ostensibly in departments start to reflect the priorities of the Center and the faculty associated with it. Graduate students increasingly work with faculty whose interests are as much in the Center as they are in the department. You start to get new interdisciplinary or postdisciplinary programs. Departments get squeezed to the periphery. Faculty in such centers around the nation establish new professional organizations and new national conferences. They get funding for new publishing venues.
  • Miller sees the necessity for developing new media composing pedagogies that foster creativity and collaboration, for preparing faculty to teach in this way (and compose themselves in this way), and for building spaces where such activities might be possible.
Barbara Lindsey

Fluid Learning | the human network - 0 views

blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=94

mark pesce higher ed technology learning control

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08 - Cached
  • There must be a point to the exercise, some reason that makes all the technology worthwhile. That search for a point – a search we are still mostly engaged in – will determine whether these computers are meaningful to the educational process, or if they are an impediment to learning.
  • What’s most interesting about the computer is how it puts paid to all of our cherished fantasies of control. The computer – or, most specifically, the global Internet connected to it – is ultimately disruptive, not just to the classroom learning experience, but to the entire rationale of the classroom, the school, the institution of learning. And if you believe this to be hyperbolic, this story will help to convince you.
  • A student about to attend university in the United States can check out all of her potential instructors before she signs up for a single class. She can choose to take classes only with those instructors who have received the best ratings – or, rather more perversely, only with those instructors known to be easy graders. The student is now wholly in control of her educational opportunities, going in eyes wide open, fully cognizant of what to expect before the first day of class.
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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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      Not so sure this has had an impact of this nature at UCONN
  • 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?
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      But what about institutional degree cache?
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      Need to follow up on the mode of educational delivery in the 13th century. Can even see this in ancient Greece with followers of Aristoteles and Plato.
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      I'm not convinced academics would agree.
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 04 Feb 09
       
      Why don't educators see this?
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      Do you see this happening at UCONN in the near future? Why or why not?
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      Any concerns about this?
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      Multi-sensory learning is actually proven to be most effective: see research by John Medina: "Brain Rules"
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      He does have a point about the statistical validity of the comments.
Barbara Lindsey

academhack » Blog Archive » The MLA, @briancroxall, and the non-rise of th... - 0 views

academhack.outsidethetext.com/...rise-of-the-digital-humanities

parry twitter mla chroniclehighered

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 08 Jan 10 - Cached
  • And this is where I think the real story in the Digital Humanities is, not the rise of the Digital Humanities, but rather the rise or non-rise of social media as a means of knowledge creation and distribution, and the fact that the rise has changed little.
  • As Amanda French (@amandafrench) argues, what social media affords us is the opportunity to amplify scholarly communication (
  • And so in the “I refute it thus” model of argumentation I offer up two observations: 1. The fact that Brian’s making public of his paper was an oddity worth noticing means that we are far away from the rise of the digital humanities. 2. The fact that a prominent digital scholar like Brian doesn’t even get one interview at the MLA means more than the economy is bad, that tenure track jobs are not being offered, but rather that Universities are still valuing the wrong stuff. They are looking for “real somebodies” instead of “virtual somebodies.” Something which the digital humanities has the potential of changing (although I remain skeptical).
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • I am more interested in how the digital effects not how we do the humanities, but rather how the digital can fundamentally change what it means to do humanities, how the digital might change the very concept of “the humanities.” I don’t want a digital facelift for the humanities, I want the digital to completely change what it means to be a humanities scholar.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 08 Jan 10
     
    Dave Parry's take on Brian Croxall MLA non-paper
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