Group items tagged

With news organizations beginning to create special positions to manage the use of social media tools, such as the recently appointed social editor at The New York Times, journalism schools are starting to recognize the need to integrate social media into their curricula. That doesn't mean having a class on Facebook (Facebook) or Twitter (Twitter), which many college students already know inside and out, but instead means that professors are delving into how these tools can be applied to enrich the craft of reporting and producing the news and ultimately telling the story in the best possible way.

The rise of online media has helped raise a new generation of college students who write far more, and in more-diverse forms, than their predecessors did. But the implications of the shift are hotly debated, both for the future of students' writing and for the college curriculum.\n\nSome scholars say that this new writing is more engaged and more connected to an audience, and that colleges should encourage students to bring lessons from that writing into the classroom. Others argue that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing habits and have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands.\n\nA new generation of longitudinal studies, which track large numbers of students over several years, is attempting to settle this argument. The "Stanford Study of Writing," a five-year study of the writing lives of Stanford students - including Mr. Otuteye - is probably the most extensive to date.

Howard Rheingold, who teaches at the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University, was an early adopter of Twitter and often turns to it for teaching advice. He explains to his digital journalism students how to use the site to establish a network of sources and, using tweets, how to entice those sources to follow them in return. In his social media course, he has his students employ Twitter for what he describes as "student-to-teacher-to-student ambient office hours."

Teaching students to learn from and with each other is a wise acknowledgment that more and more, students are relying on their peers for information. Sixty-five percent of Americans aged 12-17 and 67 percent of those aged 18-32 use social networking sites, according to the Pew Research Center. Students' lives are infused with each other's viewpoints.\n\nTeachers and professors like Parry and Camplese are taking group work to the next logical step: incorporating social media into their classrooms. In lieu of fighting teens' use of networking sites, they are communicating with students in a language that they understand.

Delivering 'Anytime, anywhere computing' was identified as the top concern in the UCISA Top Concerns survey of 2005. Delivery is a difficult balancing act - staff and students require access to office tools and applications, filestore and business applications from a variety of devices and locations (mobile phones, PDAs, laptops as well as home desktops). Service heads have to try and provide this securely to protect their institutions' assets, but in a way where authentication does not compromise ease of access and where managing connectivity does not come at the cost of a heavy demand on resources. Governance and security issues require appropriate policies for remote use of corporate information and applications, particularly on systems that may not be owned by the institution, and maintenance of security patches and antivirus software on remote systems add to the complexity. The growing use of mobile devices, increasing student ownership of 'cutting edge' devices, growth in the use of online learning and demographic changes in the student body have all contributed to systems resilience and availability becoming the major new concern for IT Directors. The expectation that services, particularly e-learning, are available 24x7 brings new demands - achieving this is a significant investment in infrastructure and maintenance and operational resource. Network security continues to be a concern - although many institutions have external antivirus and spam filter mechanisms in place, there is often a threat from within from poorly maintained systems.

investigated student perceptions of factors influencing participation in an online computer science ethics course and developed a conceptual framework with four categories: attributes of the medium, design of the learning activities, student dispositional factors, and student situational factors. Bullen identified many potential obstacles to online participation in each of these

This case study describes the design and implementation of a foundations of educational technology course with the support of a web-based application known as Drupal. Drupal is a powerful free and open source web application framework in which one can use wikis, blogs, groups, and other tools to support the classroom learning experiences of students. In this course, distance masters students used these tools to build their own wiki-based knowledge base about the field of educational technology.

Provides an interactive technology integration matrix for K-12 students. Some processes can be applied to college-level students.

This study discusses several central roles that the Internet and mobile phones play in college students' daily lives. Focus group interviews at a U.S. and a Norwegian university generated a wide variety of concerns and experiences. Three themes stand out - social connectivity, multitasking, and social control. The informants were seemingly involved in constant conversations with their friends and families. Also, there was a high degree of multi-tasking, involving several activities or media at the same time. E-mail and instant messaging supported near-continuous contact. Their constant multi-tasking could reflect a feeling that they need to be busy, but also an acquired proficiency to handle multiple simultaneous media tasks. For many of our interviewees the mobile phone was used for daily conversations and text messages as much as could be afforded. New media seem to be an integrated part of these people's lives. The thought of being without their mobile phones created feelings of anxiety for some, and their use of these media for maintaining connectivity constituted some new forms of control, even of themselves.

We've spent a lot of time at my school thinking about the concept of Personal Learning Networks (PLNs). We live in an age of information abundance. Our students need to learn how to find, evaluate, organize, synthesize, remix and re-purpose information in order to understand and solve complex problems. A PLN isn't a particularly new idea; learning networks have existed for a long time. What's new is the reach and extent that's now possible for a PLN, with technology and global interconnectedness providing the opportunity for a much wider, richer and more diverse PLN than ever before.

Online Classes See a Surge in Interest During the Struggling Economy To Help Students Finance College Courses, eLearners.com Offers the Debt-Free College Guide, a Comprehensive Database With More Than 300 Financing Options

This paper explores the potential of artificial intelligent (AI) systems in the university's core functions of teaching, learning and knowledge nexus, against the background of rapid technological change, globalisation and challenges facing universities to respond to societies' needs in the knowledge age. As knowledge and innovation will drive competitive economic advantage in increasingly Internet defined infrastructures, a new university paradigm is needed where telecommunications and computers replace roads, buildings and transport technology that underpinned the industrial university that operated in the industrial age. As the Internet a global communication tool continues to impact on all human activities and enterprise changing the way we shop, bank, do business, entertain ourselves, communicate and think, it is radically changing how, when and what we learn. This paper introduces the idea of a HyperClass based on HyperReality, an advanced form of distributed virtual reality where physical reality and virtual reality, and human intelligence and artificial intelligence intermesh and interact to provide anyone, anywhere, anytime learning, in which teaching could be done by Just in Time Artificially Intelligent Tutors (JITAITs) that will pop up when needed, whilst students use avatars -online simulacra of themselves - to interact as telepresences in classes from different countries and locations.

Something has been happening lately in education, and the implications are a bit unsettling. People are beginning to ask a cogent question, but I fear it's being framed for the wrong reason. I'm hearing more and more important decision makers asking, "Why are we using technology?"\n\nThe question itself isn't inherently problematic. In fact, it's quite an excellent question that should be asked every time we create a student learning experience, but it should be asked as a pedagogical inquisition rather than the way it's being framed in too many districts as of late.\n

This new form of learning begins with the knowledge and practices acquired in school but is equally suited for continuous, lifelong learning that extends beyond formal schooling. Indeed, such an environment might encourage students to readily and happily pick up new knowledge and skills as the world shifts beneath them.

As technology advances, new discoveries based on brain mapping are helping researchers understand how students learn. And those discoveries, in turn, are enriching and informing classroom practices in a growing number of schools.

Students embrace online learning virtual classroom - Natasha Robinson, Rocky Mount Telegram

Video describes how education is changing.