IUPUI CTL

"A growing chorus of voices argue that the internet is making us dumber. Web-connected laptops, smartphones and videogame consoles have all been cast as distracting brain mushers. But there's reason to believe some of the newest devices might not erode our minds. In fact, some scientists think they could even make us smarter."

"NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers' brainpower and moral fiber. So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we're told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans. But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously."

"Blackboard announced on Wednesday it is buying out two software companies in an effort to bolster its real-time collaboration features and satisfy a generation of professors and students increasingly shaped by social media. The company, infamous to some in higher education for its habit of swallowing up smaller fish, said it is buying Wimba and Elluminate, top providers of software that lets students work together online, for a total of $116 million."

Adobe launched Flash Player for Android 10.1 today--the latest move in the Chess match between Adobe and Apple over the future of interactive mobile ads and video content. Now, the world can begin to experience firsthand whether Flash delivers as expected on smartphones, or if Steve Jobs made the right move in turning his back on the platform.

Article on ways the iPad can be integrated or will be integrated into Education.

Successful online students share their secrets on how they have succeeded in the online environment. The pointers in this article will also help those instructors who are new to online teaching.

This article has some details on how to delete accounts from social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Good primer.

Slides from a presentation on the Tests & Quizzes tool (OOTB, Tests & Surveys Beta @ IU).

Responding to student writing in an effective and timely manner is important to student success. And we want students to succeed, to be good writers. However, students don't often expect to receive detailed and intricate feedback on their work; they expect to see the dreaded "red pen" marks. They assume that we don't really read their writing, that we give each page a cursory glance, and that we are only looking for spelling and grammatical errors. This implies-and the students believe-that "writing" is only "writing correctly." But writing is much more than that, and as professionals we understand this. We know that revision has a key role in the process of writing, but good revision requires good feedback.

People have been talking about e-books since the current crop of college students was watching Rugrats, yet use has been limited mostly to die-hard techies content to put up with significant drawbacks and uncertain benefits. Until now.

Good starting point, plus lots of links. Maybe this could be a future tech workshop?