Digital Learning

As part of our effort to understand which LMS features our faculty depend upon from Blackboard 8, we polled them (84 responded) and we created this breakdown of how they are using our current LMS

Last month, we began inviting students across the countries to fire up their Web cameras or camera-phones to send us video commentaries about whether lectures work for them. Below are highlights from the first batch of submissions, which are full of frustration with "PowerPoint abuse" - professors' poor use of slide software that dumps too much information on students in a less-than-compelling fashion.

All of us - teachers, parents, and students - retain outdated ideas about learning that are based largely on our previous experiences in school. Modern brain science has helped steer us in the right direction. Here are a few of the biggest myths:

Lifelong learners need to be skilled in finding, filtering, collating, evaluating, collaborating, editing, analyzing and utilizing information from a multitude of sources. Instead we could prioritize "content construction". Textbooks are an important gateway - a starting point from which students can learn and then begin their exploration of information on any topic (although even on that point I feel we should encourage the "critical reading" of textbooks). However the days when students could responsibly rely on any textbook as a singular information source are gone. Also, the process of accessing, synthesizing and utilizing information is often as important as the product. The skills developed are an essential component of education and life today. We have access to an exponentially growing amount of information to process and apply. There are many excellent tools we can all use to help in constructing and organizing that content. Here's a short selection of some of the more popular ones. They can be used by individuals and also by students or teachers collaborating in groups.

In order to help educators integrate iPads effectively, we have compiled a list of apps focused on learning goals consistent with the CRCD framework. While many of these apps have also appeared in our iPads in the Classroom section, this list is driven by specific learning goals that promote critical-thinking, creativity, collaboration, and the creation of student-centric learning environments. 

It is a social bookmarking program that allows you to save your 'favorites' online, so that they can be accessible from any computer with an internet connection. However, Diigo does much more than this.

The Engineering Design Process: 1.            Identify a need 2.            Establish requirements 3.            Conduct research 4.            Brainstorm possible approaches 5.            Pick best approach 6.            Develop, design and build prototypes 7.            Test to see if the design works 8.            Begin production         

here is a handy guide to some of the most common arguments made against the use of technology in education, and how to counter them

In practice, we found Explain Everything to be more useful to our teaching than Educreations. While the simple screencasts of Educreations are fun to create, truly effective delivery of content such as screencasts depend on flexibility, and that means owning the video output directly. Since Educreations hosts videos only on its own site and only provides various linking and embedding options, neither students nor teachers can download them. Explain Everything offers full ownership and possession of the videos hosted at YouTube, or in MP4 format when downloaded from DropBox

The first, Booktype, is free and open-source. Once the platform is installed on a Web server, teams of authors can work together in their browsers to write sections of books and chat with each other in real time about revisions. Entire chapters can be imported and moved around by dragging and dropping. The finished product can be published in minutes on e-readers and tablets, or exported for on-demand printing. Booktype also comes with community features that let authors create profiles, join groups, and track books through editing.

Alarmed by the tendency of engineering programs to hemorrhage undergraduates, at a time when the White House has called for an additional million degrees in science, technology, engineering and math fields-known as STEM-education researchers here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science proposed ways to improve the numbers. At a symposium on engineering education, one group outlined a broad revamping of curriculum, while another proposed more modest changes to pedagogy.

Science, math and engineering departments at many universities are abandoning or retooling the lecture as a style of teaching, worried that it's driving students away.

So what's wrong? In short, the common thread I see throughout all the failures is quite simply a lack of empathy. There is no authentic encounter with students, or what Martin Buber called "a genuine meeting." When we use all the right methods, and we still fail, it is most likely because we are encountering our students as objects and not as the rich and complex individuals that they are.

Who ultimately ends up on top has huge implications for educational technology leaders, who must determine which company is the best fit for their needs, and at a cost their districts can afford in still-difficult budget times. Complicating those decisions are changes in the technological landscape that are raising questions about the long-term educational relevance of interactive whiteboards. Do classrooms really need them in the age of iPads?

Review of Literature on Remote and Web-based Science Labs

Readium, a project of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) and supporters, is an open source reference system and rendering engine for EPUB publications. EPUB is the industry-standard open format for eBooks and digital publications. The latest version, EPUB 3, is based on Web Standard technologies such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, and the DOM. The overall aim of the Readium project is to ensure that open source software for handling EPUB 3 publications is readily available, to accelerate adoption of EPUB 3 as the universal, accessible, global digital publishing format. Readium is built on WebKit , the embeddable open source Web content engine.

a collaborative catalogue for online tools for participation

Social is one of the hottest trends in enterprise software, and many companies are considering rolling out products and services that make it easier for employees to share information with each other and communicate with customers and suppliers.

Johnston's title is an easy-to-update, "good-enough" product that didn't require millions of dollars and years of effort to create and manage. A cadre of Duke computer science graduates, in fact, built the platform in one semester on a $5,000 budget.