Digital Learning

Project Bamboo is currently piloting a directory of tools, services, and collections that can facilitate digital research. This evolution of Lisa Spiro's DiRT wiki includes new ways of browsing and commenting on the entries.

We describe a collection of interactive animations and visualizations for teaching quantum mechanics. The animations can be used at all levels of the undergraduate curriculum. Each animation includes a step-by-step exploration that explains the key points. The animations and instructor resources are freely available. By using a diagnostic survey, we report substantial learning gains for students who have worked with the animations.

Choosing a system of interest and identifying the interactions of the system with its environment are crucial steps in applying the relation between work and energy. Responses to problems that we administered in introductory calculus-based physics courses show that many students fail to recognize the implications of a particular choice of system. In some cases, students do not believe that particular groupings of objects can even be considered to be a system. Some errors are more prevalent in situations involving gravitational potential energy than elastic potential energy. The difficulties are manifested in both qualitative and quantitative reasoning.

In entry-level courses it's often a struggle to get students to see that the content has larger significance and intriguing aspects. In most science textbooks, for example, only well-established facts are presented, and they are supported by equally well-know research studies. Textbooks don't usually identify areas of inquiry where the questions have yet to be answered or the findings so far are controversial. And yet often, this is the content most likely to interest students. But can you expect beginning students to read original sources, like research studies? Could you expect them to answer test questions about those articles? A biology professor reports on his experience using research articles and asking test questions about them in an undergraduate course for students majoring in life sciences. Students were assigned a research article to read-the article was relevant to content being covered in class. It was posted on an accessible website. Sometimes the article was discussed during the lectures and sometimes it was the topic of a tutorial session (these were large classes that included tutorial sections). Either way the students had access to the articles before and during the assessment activity.

Welcome to the world of Diigo, one of the leading Top 10 research tools. Diigo is a cloud based information management system that helps you organize relevant facts you find online. With Diigo you can keep track of those favorite websites and revisit them from any computer at any time. Diigo is a great way to improve your online productivity and is widely used by educators. Educators, worldwide, have enjoyed the use of this social bookmarking site. Diigo is a great web-based tool for teachers to utilize,

I have been working on a simple method of analysing teaching and learning technologies against Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. I have taken the verbs associated with each of the taxonomic levels and arranged them across a sheets and then added a column for the activity components. The idea is that you take your activity and break it down into the component elements and match these against the different taxonomic levels and the learning actions.

Many of us working in the field of learning technologies take for granted the need for innovation, but it is incumbent on us that we do not push innovation for innovation's sake. Nevertheless, my view is that at least for post-secondary education, we are in desperate need of innovation, and that e-learning and online learning needs to be a major component of changes to the system. In this post I want to discuss why I think that innovation is essential, and why learning technologies need to be a central part of such innovation

I'm finding in current iTunes U courses and collections, each collection tends to have a lot of apps and items embedded that cost money (even if a free alternative exists or is already installed.)

iTunes U has, up 'til now, been just that: files to download. Although most of the content is lecture podcasts (in video or audio form), there have also been course documents and slideshows as well.

student evaluations are most correlated with: expected grade, teacher personality, attractiveness. "Administrators rely heavily on student evaluations of teaching, but the reality is, they don't correlate with good teaching. Students don't necessarily "like" teaching that makes them think."

As an educational tool, social media enriches the learning experience by allowing students and teachers to connect and interact in new, exciting ways. Web sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn provide a platform where users can dialog, exchange ideas, and find answers to questions. These sites are designed to foster collaboration and discussion.

Student evaluations and a heavy reliance on them can be problematic for several reasons, the authors of the paper argued. Departments can misinterpret these evaluations by comparing averages for all instructors in similar courses, which can be a very imprecise measure. Moreover, instructors may alter their teaching methods solely to boost their student evaluation scores. The potential problems, according to the paper. Teachers might try to entertain and not educate. "To instructors, generating positive student answers to questions about overall effectiveness and communication skills may smack of entertainment and dumbing down," the paper says. Professors might try to drive out malcontents or otherwise unhappy students before the end-of-semester evaluations. Instructors might avoid attempts at innovation and play it safe in the classroom just to get better evaluations.

When I read this article and what they are doing, I shuddered. I come from a background where distance education courses are specifically re-designed for distance learners. In particular, they are designed to allow students to interact with instructor and other students any time and anywhere. They are designed to ensure that distance learners have adequate support and help from their instructors. This takes longer and means thinking differently about how the course is designed and delivered - not taking the standard classroom model and multiplying it to extra students. Now I'm not against introducing new methods of design to accommodate or exploit new technology, but it must meet certain criteria. Does it at least maintain and if possible increase the interaction between student and instructor and between students? Do all students have equal access to service within the course? Does it provide the flexibility and access that distance learners require? Do students learn better?

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.

Some of the most innovative applications for hand-held devices, however, have come from professors working on their own. They find ways to adapt popular smartphone software to the classroom setting, or even write their own code. That's what I discovered when I put out a call on Twitter, as well as to a major e-mail list of college public-relations officers, asking about the areas in which professors and college officials are making the most of their mobile devices. Here are the six scenarios that people mentioned most often. I have highlighted the apps in each category that got users' highest marks.

Then something odd happened: The students, all in their mid- to late 20s, became self-conscious about carrying iPads. They refused to use them in public. They felt elitist. In their eyes, the iPad represented snobbery, a technological tool that no one needed and whose utility was far from apparent. Used to a graduate student frugality, they didn't want to be seen as profligate.

Collection of articles and resources related to using the Diigo social bookmarking tool in education

 Motivational scaffolding consisted of using chat to run study skills support groups, where stu- dents were helped to stay on task, and instructor office hours. Students were classified as either high or low procrastinators, and randomly assigned to each version, and two instructors alternated between versions taught from one term to the other. Results showed that procrastinating students, for whom the lack of structure of distance learning may be problematic, performed better in the motivationally-scaffolded version than the traditional, while non-procrastinating students performed equally in both.

Students in academic difficulty who took the "Learning and Motivation Strategies" course in their first quarter at Ohio State were about 45 percent more likely to graduate within six years than similar students who didn't take the class. Average-ability students who took the course were also six times more likely to stay in college for a second year and had higher grade point averages than those who didn't take the class. "We are taking the students who are least likely to succeed in college and teaching them the skills they need to stay in school and graduate," said Bruce Tuckman, a professor of education at Ohio State, and creator of the course.

Why College Students Leave the Engineering Track http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/why-students-leave-the-engineering-track/ Actually another study of science students asked the students why they were transferring or dropping out of science majors, and the number one reason cited was poor teaching: http://www.science20.com/news_releases/6_researchers_take_science_education "when college students abandon science as a major, 90 percent of them do so because of what they perceive as poor teaching; and, among those who remain in the sciences, 74 percent lament the poor quality of teaching" via http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/50-examples-of-the-need-to-improve-college-teaching/