What’s happening with universities in this knowledge age is that the boundaries between the university and the rest of the world have pretty much dissolved. We are now a learning culture, or a knowledge culture.

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.

Students began by identifying a personal belief before writing drafts that refined their focus through vividly related examples. Finally, they were invited to submit essays to the NPR website and record them on iPods with a memo recorder attachment for transmission via iTunes U. Though public distribution was not required, this aspect of the assignment provided additional motivation for students carefully to hone their final essays. "I think it's very important to provide students an opportunity to write for a broader audience, instead of simply writing for the teacher," Dickson said. "These kinds of assignments put writing back into the public sphere as an essential skill of the future community leader. iTunes U helps create this broader audience."

This new form of writing assignment involves students in a wider debate of public and private beliefs and encourages them to add their own voices to this dialogue. Much like their NPR counterparts, the essay podcasts emphasize the diversity of viewpoints on campus through the simple power of the human voice. Assignments like these, in providing students a real-world audience, value the experiences and expertise each student brings to the classroom. Whether podcasts are shared with the class, the campus, or the world, students move from simply receiving messages to a higher-level of investment in crafting and refining messages of their own.  

In the converged space where the Internet and telecommunications meet, new possibilities exist for the convergence of in-class and out-of-class activities, curricular and extra-curricular learning. And as we've already seen, new tools enable new approaches, extending the classroom of the 21st century by making new learning opportunities possible.

It's not that post-millenials are ambivalent to news; it's just that they consume it in a new, digital way.

This trend simply opens up opportunities unavailable to print media in the past. Journalists who could publish only once a day now have unlimited publication opportunities and can send stories out by email, text message, and RSS feed.

Journalists who only had text and still pictures available to them in the past now can tell their stories with audio and video.

students are conditioned to consume news, like everything else, in a buffet style, offering them print, still photography, audio and video serves them the way they consume.

We don't know of any universities that are doing it exactly like this."

To take advantage of these changes, the university and the department have raised $1.2 million to fund the construction of a new media center. The "Convergence Newsroom" will house the student reporting staffs of all the respective ACU media: Optimist (a semi-weekly newspaper), The Prickly Pear (the annual yearbook), Paw-TV (bi-weekly television), and ACUOptimist.com (online print, audio and video). Internally, the convergence of staffs into a unified space will allow greater synergy in training and production among the student journalists.

The New Media Newsroom is the first step in preparing future journalists for the newsrooms in which they'll work as they enter into their careers.

"True learning is a deeply emotional process.

Team members would also no longer have to be in the same location to prepare strategy presentations. They could share new ideas or notify one another about important market news immediately with an email, a text message, or a conference call, regardless of their location. During presentations, requests for additional information could be met immediately. Even calls with a company's investor relations office could be set up on the fly.Incorporating the new generation of converged devices into their studies would improve student managers' ability to conduct business. It would also make STAR more valuable to students by allowing them to practice with the type of cutting-edge technology that will be their everyday tools once they move into the war rooms of Wall Street.

Enhancing his interaction with students and their engagement in his courses, educators like Beck want to keep building relationships with students that change thinking - and change lives. They want solutions that "just work" to help them in those efforts. 

Using team-based learning, my classroom takes advantage of moving desks and chairs so that students can engage in problem-solving rather than focusing on me behind a podium. The stadium seating is a challenge, too, because I move among the teams, often sitting to have conversations with them as they work through the course materials." This kind of teaching is difficult to imagine in a fixed-seat space with small fold-away desks.

As the first semester of "American Identity in the Modern Period" neared, conversations about the logistics of team-teaching and the classroom space were replaced with discussions anticipating the integrative learning experience. As McGregor noted, 'What I looked forward to most was being a fellow learner along with my colleagues and students. This course was the first I ever participated in as a faculty member where I wasn't the exclusive 'expert.' I learned much alongside my students from my colleagues' fields of expertise and the connections they brought."

Students from this generation really want to do something bigger than themselves."

While it's nearly impossible to gather all 180 Barret students and faculty mentors together for a traditional meeting, a virtual meeting - where documents, audio, video, and web content are shared - could be more easily managed with this sort of technology.

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."

Ms. Chiang and Mr. Delaney were delighted to discover that the quality of the writing for the blog surpassed her students' previous work. Moreover, when Ms. Chiang had them record audio versions of their essays in English and Mandarin using school iPod's, the students' accents were vastly improved.

Still, some educators are not completely sold on the value of interactivity. "If interactivity becomes the fundamental basis of the educational process, how do we judge merit?" asked Robbie McClintock, a learning technologies expert at Teachers College of Columbia University.

The push by some teachers for greater interactivity in the classroom also goes against the current emphasis on testing. Testing requires a known body of material, but interactive learning often involves students' seeking out topics on their own.

It's a conflict that's familiar to Michael Cunningham, a high school speech and debate teacher at Del Valle High School in Del Valle, Tex., outside Austin. Mr. Cunningham runs the Skype Foreign Language Lab, a program that allows students around the world to talk with one another via computers and headsets using the free VoIP phone service Skype. He began the exchange in 2002 with three schools; this fall, the network will have 47 schools in seven countries. The program is interdisciplinary; last year, some Del Valle students were assigned phone pals in France, Italy and Turkey to practice foreign languages, while others participated in mock parliamentary debates.

Twitter is fast becoming a serious platform for discourse and discussion. More than a status app, it is being used as a first alert mechanism for the dissemination of news and for immediate discussion surrounding that news. It is the coverage of news events and the continued emergence of citizen journalism that will push Twitter toward the mainstream this year.

Increasingly mainstream news reporters and bloggers are utilizing Twitter to put up news tid bits as they happen, and commentary as it pops into their heads.

Twitter has smartly nourished a large set of tools that help people use the service. This makes it easier for people to get content on Twitter in the manner most convenient and most comfortable to them, which in the long run should help drive adoption of the service. "The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we've done with Twitter," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told us in September.

The API has also allowed for mashups that filter Twitter content making it easier to find. One relevant Twitter aggregator is Politweets (our coverage), which brings together all the messages sent over Twitter about the US election.

Unlike TV or newspaper, Twitter allows for a conversation.

Twitter encourages discourse and feedback. For reporters that aren't afraid to get down and dirty, Twitter is a golden opportunity to build a rapport with readers and gauge public opinion. It also makes readers feel more connected to the news when they can participate in a discussion about it as it happens, often times with the people reporting it first hand.

"It's not right for every piece of information. It's certainly not well suited for longer analysis. But when it comes to instantly assembling raw data from several sources that then go into fully baked news stories, nothing beats it."

But for the mainstream audience, Twitter might need better filtering tools before people can really wrap their heads around it.

it's not threaded, so replies get shuffled around and often times, out of context, just become confusing. Further, when everyone is having a conversation at once, things get noisy. Twitter desperately needs a filter.

Twitter is being used more and more for mainstream news coverage. KPBS News San Diego uses Twitter to put out updates about stories, for example, and during the California wildfires last fall it was a must read. The potential for Twitter to be used for news dissemination is something the site's founders realized early on during an earthquake.

it seems likely that Twitter will become an increasingly more important point for the distribution of breaking news during 2008, to the extent that traditional journalists will begin to pay more and more attention to it the way they have to blogs.

If you have multiple teachers teaching sections of a course and they need to teach from the same materials, they have a central hub to which they can collaboratively contribute material ... and then from which they can teach and keep all their sections.

For students, wikis are beneficial primarily as a collaborative tool for things like group assignments in courses.

Wikipedia Scanner

This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.

The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.

By exposing the anonymous edits that companies such as drugs and big pharmaceutical companies make in entries that affect their businesses, it could help experts check up on the changes and make sure they're accurate, he says.