Instructional & Media Services at Dickinson College

The idea is that we  should challenge thinking, inspire creativity, and stir up discussion with a Powerpoint presentation – not present a series of dry facts. 

More than any thing else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web.

Davidson and Goldberg call on us to examine potential new models of digital learning and rethink our virtually enabled and enhanced learning institutions.

available in a free digital edition

Now in ARTstor: Photographs from ancient sites in Dura-Europos, Syria and Gerasa, Jordan

neuroplasticity, meaning that the brain can still learn new concepts after various ages, and that every student can be taught many different ways. In a sense, the brain can be rewired.

the best research is tied to classroom practice.

"Education is an applied field, like engineering," said Atherton. "If there's no connection to practice, then that research is best left to basic researchers in the cognitive neurosciences."

the most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to solve — of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate.

Apple can decide who gets to write code for your phone and which of those offerings will be allowed to run. The company has used this power in ways that Bill Gates never dreamed of when he was the king of Windows: Apple is reported to have censored e-book apps that contain controversial content, eliminated games with political overtones, and blocked uses for the phone that compete with the company’s products. The market is churning through these issues. Amazon is offering a generic cloud-computing infrastructure so anyone can set up new software on a new Web site without gatekeeping by the likes of Facebook. Google’s Android platform is being used in a new generation of mobile phones with fewer restrictions on outside code. But the dynamics here are complicated. When we vest our activities and identities in one place in the cloud, it takes a lot of dissatisfaction for us to move. And many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.

It is likely too early to gauge the effectiveness of these social media courses, degrees, and classroom experiments. Perhaps such endeavors are akin to, as a colleague recently mused, "a massively expensive For Dummies book." Our understanding of online culture will continue to evolve with or without academia's involvement, but it does beg the question: Should our institutions of higher education share some of the responsibility of explaining the online frontier of social media, or are its participants fully capable of self-management and adaptation? The answer may require more than 140 characters.

At an open "listening session" with top executives of Blackboard here Wednesday at the company's annual conference, college officials expressed frustration with many of the system's fundamental characteristics. At times, the meeting seemed to turn into a communal gripe session, with complaints ranging from the system's discussion forum application, to the improved -- but still lacking -- user support, to the training materials for faculty members. Participants' concerns were often greeted with nods of agreement and outright applause from their peers as they spoke of their frustrations with the system.

"We recognize there are still some shortcomings in our products," responded Michael Chasen, president and CEO of Blackboard.

new technology that is revolutionizing the way Arabic-speaking people use the Internet

Abdullah says that of her 500 Egyptian students, 78 percent have never typed in Arabic online, a fact that greatly disturbed Habib Haddad, a Boston-based software engineer originally from Lebanon. "I mean imagine [if] 78 percent of French people don't type French," Haddad says. "Imagine how destructive that is online."

"The idea is, if you don't have an Arabic keyboard, you can type Arabic by spelling your words out phonetically," Jureidini says. "For example ... when you're writing the word 'falafel,' Yamli will convert that to Arabic in your Web browser. We will go and search not only the Arabic script version of that search query, but also for all the Western variations of that keyword."

Bachelor's degree in political science, Dickinson College, 1977;

The British Library has put two million digitised pages from 19th century newspapers online, taking research out of its dusty reading rooms into people's homes.The pay-as-you-go service brings a century of history alive from Jack-the-Ripper to WC Grace.

Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth

"ambient awareness"

Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.