Instructional & Media Services at Dickinson College

When we say that someone has “learned” a subject, we typically mean that they have shown evidence of mastery not only of basic cognitive processes like factual recall and working mechanical exercises but also higher-level tasks like applying concepts to new problems and judging between two equivalent concepts. A student learning calculus, for instance, needs to demonstrate that s/he can do things like take derivatives of polynomials and use the Chain Rule. But if this is all they can demonstrate, then it’s stretching it to say that the student has “learned calculus”, because calculus is a lot more than just executing mechanical processes correctly and quickly.

Even if the student can solve optimization or related rates problems just like the ones in the book and in the lecture — but doesn’t know how to start if the optimization or related rates problem does not match their template — then the student hasn’t really learned calculus. At that point, those “applied” problems are just more mechanical processes. We may say the student has learned about calculus, but when it comes to the uses of the subject that really matter — applying calculus concepts to ambiguous and/or complex problems, choosing the best of equivalent methods or results, creating models to solve novel problems — this student’s calculus knowledge is not of much use.

Khan Academy is great for learning about lots of different subjects. But it’s not really adequate for learning those subjects on a level that really makes a difference in the world.

Abilene Christian University says handing out iPhones to its entire first-year class in 2008 has improved interaction between students and faculty members.

Does positive feeling mean better teaching and learning? Mr. Schubert adds that it's too early to collect enough data to understand how giving out iPhones improves education. Student testimonials in the report, however, highlight easier access to professors. One savvy student says having an iPhone means he's less confused in class. "My professor will ask a question about something and I don't know what it is, but right here on my phone, with just one touch, I have Dictionary.com, I have a Wikipedia app—I can look it up," said Tyler Sutphen, a marketing major. "I know what they're talking about, because it's right there."

In an effort to engage former students with events on campus, Colgate University is using Webcast technology to allow even the most remote alumni to watch and participate when prominent writers visit the school.

“There’s a real appetite for intellectual engagement among our alumni,” he says. “They miss the classroom and the Colgate liberal-arts experience, and now we have the means to give it to them again.”Mr. Mansfield says that while the class might be costly for the English department -- authors don’t come cheap -- the decision to pay for the universal broadcast was a “no brainer” since the school already had the technology and had to pay only a “negligible” monthly fee to run the site on Livestream.

I grab feeds from external blogs all the time that are related to UMW an pull them into our sitewide “tags” blog (the name tags here is confusing, it is simply a republishing of everything in the entire WPMu install) with FeedWordPress. For example, I stumbled across this post in the tags blog on UMW Blogs tonight, which was actually being pulled in from a WordPress.com blog of a student who graduated years ago, but regularly blogs about her work in historic preservation.  This particular post was all about a book she read as an undergraduate in Historic Preservation, and how great a resource it is.  A valuable post, especially since the professor who recommended that book, W. Brown Morton, retired last year. There is a kind of eternal echo in a system like this that students, faculty, and staff can continue to feed into a community of teaching and learning well beyond their matriculation period, or even their career.

what we are doing as instructional technologists, scholars and students in higher ed right now is much bigger than a particular blogging system or software, I see my job as working with people to imagine the implications and possibilities of managing and maintaining their digital identity in a moment when we are truly in a deep transformation of information, identity, and scholarship.

we’ll host domains that professors purchase and, ideally, map all their domains onto one WP install that can manage many multi-blogging solutions from one install.  The whole Russian Doll thing that WPMu can do with the Multi-Site Manager plugin. So you offer a Bluehost like setup for faculty, and if that is too much, allow them to map a domain, take control of their own course work, and encourage an aggregated course management model that pushes students to take control of their digital identity and spaces by extension.  Giving students a space and voice on your domain or application is not the same as asking them to create, manage and maintain their own space.  Moreover, it doesn’t feed into the idea of a digital trajectory that starts well before they come to college and will end well after they leave.  This model extends the community, and brings in key resources like a recent graduate discussing an out-of-print historic preservation text book a retired professor assigned to be one of the best resources for an aspiring Preservation graduate student. This is what it is all about, right there, and it’s not gonna happen in silos and on someone else’s space, we need to provision, empower, and imagine the merge as a full powered move to many. many domains of one’s own.

Most of the criticisms center around the Kindle's weak annotation features, which make things like highlighting and margin notes almost impossible to use, but even a simple thing like the lack of true page numbers has caused problems, since allowing students to cite the Kindle's location numbers in their papers is "meaningless for anyone working from analog books."

a site that wants to look at the intersection of productivity, technology, and pedagogy in higher education

showing that the barrier of entry to this new stuff is lower than it seems

One hundred percent of this stuff we bring into our own classroom. If the slogan for software development is to eat your own dog food, we are always eating our own dog food. These are our assignments, our best practices.

he Anti-Google: Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO)

essentially a straightforward, hyperlinked collection of professionally-produced, peer-reviewed bibliographies in different subject areas—sort of a giant, interactive syllabus put together by OUP and teams of scholars in different disciplines

"You can't come up with a search filter that solves the problem of information overload," Zucca told Ars. OUP is betting that the solution to the problem lies in content, which is its area of expertise, and not in technology, which is Google's and Microsoft's.

"Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth. Montaigne, for good measure, also peppered his essays with myriads of what bloggers would call external links"

Honesty

Openness

The Google Wave chatting tool is too complicated for its own good.

Chatting on Wave is like talking to an overcurious mind reader.

This behavior is so corrosive to normal conversation that you'd think it was some kind of bug. In fact, it's a feature—indeed, it's one of the Wave team's proudest accomplishments.

a trend toward the integration of service learning into study abroad and global studies more generally at the liberal arts colleges I work with

an element to the study abroad experience that goes beyond cultural immersion. Students grapple with important and timely issues

I am currently working with Andy Wallis from Whittier College and Chris Boyland from Bryn Mawr College on planning a virtual program for later the Fall semester, and the integration of service learning with international education was one of the issues that most resonated on the survey we are conducting to help us develop a program responsive to the needs and interests of folks at NITLE’s participating colleges.