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What I like about this article is how it discusses using students to help teachers learn technology and its applications for learning.

What's interesting about this tool is not so much that it is an online learning environment for teachers and their students, but that it can also be used to make connections between teachers.  This could be useful for instructors who may feel isolated at their particular school and a chance to branch out.

"Online education is often held out as a way to increase access to higher education, especially for those -- adult students, the academically underprepared, members of some minority groups -- who have historically been underrepresented in college. But that access is meaningful only if it leads somewhere, and if the education students get helps them reach their goals. New data from a long-term study by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University's Teachers College suggest that some of the students most often targeted in online learning's access mission are less likely than their peers to benefit from -- and may in fact be hurt by -- digital as opposed to face-to-face instruction. The study did not, however, account for the quality of the online courses studied, making it difficult to draw from its findings overly sweeping generalizations about the efficacy of online learning."

Interesting article on online learning - completion rates, completers . . .

"Teaching's primary purpose should be to ensure that every student graduates ready to tinker, create, and take initiative."

Interesting app. Be nice if students could also send stuff to the teacher. Hmmm. Still like the AppleTV in the classroom idea.

"The author of the best-selling What the Best College Teachers Do is back with more humane, doable, and inspiring help, this time for students who want to get the most out of college-and every other educational enterprise, too. The first thing they should do? Think beyond the transcript. The creative, successful people profiled in this book-college graduates who went on to change the world we live in-aimed higher than straight A's. They used their four years to cultivate habits of thought that would enable them to grow and adapt throughout their lives. Combining academic research on learning and motivation with insights drawn from interviews with people who have won Nobel Prizes, Emmys, fame, or the admiration of people in their field, Ken Bain identifies the key attitudes that distinguished the best college students from their peers. These individuals started out with the belief that intelligence and ability are expandable, not fixed. This led them to make connections across disciplines, to develop a "meta-cognitive" understanding of their own ways of thinking, and to find ways to negotiate ill-structured problems rather than simply looking for right answers. Intrinsically motivated by their own sense of purpose, they were not demoralized by failure nor overly impressed with conventional notions of success. These movers and shakers didn't achieve success by making success their goal. For them, it was a byproduct of following their intellectual curiosity, solving useful problems, and taking risks in order to learn and grow."

"Define Your Boundaries How you choose to set boundaries on the kinds of communication you have with colleagues and students will ultimately be a personal decision, albeit shaped by campus policy (on office hours or the use of email) and departmental culture (some departments expect your attendance at frequent social events, and others don't). Because the language of social media (following and friending) tends to blur boundaries, it's very important that teachers communicate carefully with students about their own practices (I and many other faculty simply have a rule of not friending students on Facebook, for example) and especially when social media are included in course requirements. Jason and Alex's discussion of the creepy treehouse problem offers some good suggestions on making your reasons for using social media for the course transparent. "

"The Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Mount Royal University is pleased to announce our 2011 Centennial Symposium on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, November 10-12, 2011 in Banff Alberta Canada. This gathering of teacher/scholars is a "practitioners conference" dedicated to developing individual and collaborative teaching and learning scholarship, sharing nascent data and findings, going public with compelling results of completed research projects, and building an extended scholarly community. The goals of this event, and the Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Mount Royal University, include understanding and improving student learning through systematic scholarly inquiry and building collective knowledge for the future."

"Too often assessment is an additional chore to be completed for compliance and reporting reasons. Waypoint Outcomes builds software that streamlines the interactions between learners and teachers. The results can mean a dramatically improved dialog about outcomes and rich data on student learning. Tightly integrated with Blackboard, Moodle, and Blackboard Vista or used as a stand-alone tool, Waypoint® helps educators improve the quality of feedback to students on authentic tasks and build a culture of continuous improvement."