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gary chinn

How Big Can E-Learning Get? At Southern New Hampshire U., Very Big - Technology - The C... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...128809

E-Learning online

shared by gary chinn on 30 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • In a former textile mill in downtown Manchester, the university's president, Paul J. ­LeBlanc, has installed a team of for-profit veterans who help run a highly autonomous online outfit that caters to older students, with classes taught mostly by low-paid adjuncts. Their online operation is the institution's economic engine, subsidizing its money-losing undergraduate campus, known as University College, whose 2,350 students enjoy a new dining hall, Olympic-size pool, and small classes taught largely by full-time professors. "The traditional campus, in some ways, now has the resources to be even more traditional," Mr. LeBlanc says in his office on the suburban main campus, four miles from the online college. "And the nontraditional, with this split, has the ability to be even more nontraditional."
  • "It doesn't seem to me to be the 'disruptive innovation' that's going to transform things," says Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University and one of the authors of Academically Adrift, a harsh critique of undergraduate learning. "It seems to me like just business as usual.
  • A lucrative one, too. With 7,000 online students, up from 1,700 four years ago, the College of Online and Continuing Education is on track to generate $73-million in revenues this year and more than $100-million next year. It posted a 41-percent "profit" margin in the 2011 fiscal year. The university plows the surplus into new buildings, employee salaries, financial aid at the traditional campus, and improvements in the online program.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • But can a mainstream organization harness a disruptive innovation? "With few exceptions," he writes in The Innovator's Dilemma, that approach has succeeded only when managers "set up an autonomous organization charged with building a new and independent business around the disruptive technology."
  • Ms. Cohen, the math professor, has felt that some online courses failed to match those offered face to face. She is in a unique position to judge, as a full-time professor who teaches both in classrooms and online, and who also serves on the Web college's curriculum committee. Visiting online classes in past years, she found personal interaction with students lacking. Online faculty were teaching without any tests, only assignments and discussion. "That's not teaching a math course," she says.
  • Nationally, undergraduates complement their educations with online classes, but little evidence exists that students under 23 are actively pursuing all or the majority of their study online, says Mr. Garrett, of Eduventures
  • gary chinn on 30 Aug 11
     
    very interesting article from the chronicle, touching on online teaching, innovation, instructional quality, faculty roles, and the needs of different student populations.
Cole Camplese

Disrupting College - 0 views

www.americanprogress.org/...disrupting_college.html

innovation disruption ci597

shared by Cole Camplese on 08 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • rcentage of our citizens—many from low-income, African-American, and Hispanic families. The institutions are now increasingly beset by financial difficulties, and the recent financial meltdown is but a shadow of what is to come. The further looming state budget crises spell difficult times for many colleges and universities. And there is a growing acknowledgement that many American universities’ prestige came not from being the best at educating, but from being the best at research and from being selective and accepting the best and brightest—which all institutions have mimicked.
  • The institutions are now increasingly beset by financial difficulties, and the recent financial meltdown is but a shadow of what is to come. The further looming state budget crises spell difficult times for many colleges and universities. And there is a growing acknowledgement that many American universities’ prestige came not from being the best at educating, but from being the best at research and from being selective and accepting the best and brightest—which all institutions have mimicked.
Cole Camplese

Web Search: Teaching and Learning with Technology: Using Apps to Enhance Learning for U... - 8 views

jimjansen.blogspot.com/...-learning-with-technology.html

tltfacultyfellow psutlt

shared by Cole Camplese on 10 May 11 - No Cached
  • Honestly, there is already a lot on my plate with teaching and research; however, I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work with Cole Camplese, Allan Gyorke, Brad Kozlek, and the rest of the TLT folks. (Note: Cole is a definite ‘early adopter’ and teaches a very popular course at Penn State on disruptive technologies.)
Cole Camplese

DNA/How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet - 1 views

www.douglasadams.com/...19990901-00-a.html

ci597 disruption psuhack technology internet

shared by Cole Camplese on 11 May 11 - Cached
  • I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this: 1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; 2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; 3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
  • In other words the cost of connection is rapidly approaching zero, and for a very simple reason: the value of the web increases with every single additional person who joins it. It’s in everybody’s interest for costs to keep dropping closer and closer to nothing until every last person on the planet is connected.
  • Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for ‘productivity.’
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  • The same thing is happening in communication technology. Most of us are stumbling along in a kind of pidgin version of it, squinting myopically at things the size of fridges on our desks, not quite understanding where email goes, and cursing at the beeps of mobile phones. Our children, however, are doing something completely different. Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities. They are not exchanging important business information, they’re just chattering, staying in touch. "We are herd animals," he says. "These kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving." Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will "bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology."
  • Cole Camplese on 11 May 11
     
    Great piece by the late Douglas Adams in 1999.  So true in the rearview mirror!
  • bkozlek on 11 May 11
     
    An 11 year old text, the message of which still needs to be delivered to many people today.
bkozlek

1DollarScan - 3 views

1dollarscan.com/index.php

psutlt ipad ebooks

shared by bkozlek on 18 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • bkozlek on 18 Aug 11
     
    Send them a book and for 1 dollar (per 100 pages) they will convert it to an OCRed PDF for you. 
  • Cole Camplese on 26 Aug 11
     
    I'd like to try this. What book shall we send?
  • bkozlek on 29 Aug 11
     
    Imagine sending in your personal handwritten notebook. As for a "real" book to send, I have no idea. I do have a copy of "Perfect Phrases For Documenting Employee Performance Problems" lying around. What about content for the next go of ci597 on disruptive tech?
Allan Gyorke

iOS App for Non-Verbal People - 2 views

www.alltogetherwecan.com/...s-at-apple-stores-and-best-buy

accessibility app iOS

shared by Allan Gyorke on 13 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Allan Gyorke on 13 Apr 11
     
    Sam Sennott created an app that helps some autistic and non-verbal people communicate using the touch screen and a series of pictures. He happens to be a PhD student at Penn State in the Special Education program.
  • bkozlek on 13 Apr 11
     
    This is another market the iPad is disrupting. The previous devices to address this were incredibly expensive and bulky.
  • Allan Gyorke on 13 Apr 11
     
    I thought you'd be interested in this. I'd like to bring Sam down here for a demo and discussion about his app. I think it would be a very interesting discussion - and a truly excellent use of a mobile touchscreen device.
Chris Millet

BBC News - Internet's memory effects quantified in computer study - 5 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...science-environment-14145045

shared by Chris Millet on 17 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Allan Gyorke on 18 Jul 11
     
    Good article. You know CHAT (the learning theory), right? I like it because it considers our tools and environment as part of how we (collectively) learn. Our cell phones and laptops and Google are part of the equation. So yes, Allan's brain may remember less at a given time, but Allan+iPhone+Google remembers many orders of magnitude more and with much more accuracy.
  • Chris Millet on 18 Jul 11
     
    We talked about this quite a bit in our Disruptive Technologies course with Cole and Scott in terms of distributed intelligence, which is similar to what you're saying in that the tools we use are extensions of our minds. Maybe it's because I'm a SciFi geek and have read so many post-apocalyptic books, or perhaps it's just that I know technology too well to trust it, but my biggest fear about what this research is suggesting is that, should our technology disappear, we'll all turn into gibbering idiots because half our mind has been turned off, literally. Realistically, I know that the human brain is much more plastic and our memory would reconfigure itself eventually. And the benefits of extending ourselves like this probably outweigh the risks. But it still gives you pause for thought..
  • Allan Gyorke on 18 Jul 11
     
    Right now, our dependence on instant gratification knowledge isn't too bad, I'm sure we'd have a feeling of disconnection and lots of frustration. I'd consider buying a set of encyclopedias again. I worry more about a scenario like running out of fuel without energy alternatives. The human race is so dependent on fuel for food production and transportation that we'd run into a starvation issue very quickly. We've lost our survival skills and there are just too many of us.
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