Group items tagged

He found that in nearly identical classes, Canadian college students learned a lot more from teaching assistants using interactive tools than they did from a veteran professor giving a traditional lecture. The students who had to engage interactively using the TV remote-like devices scored about twice as high on a test compared to those who heard the normal lecture, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

So, why are they so involved in social media? Geoff Halberstadt, undergraduate student in the College of the Liberal Arts, said that social media has reached the point where it cannot be ignored. Students are heavily engaged in social media, and it is a primary method of communication for them. “Students live in an age of technology, an instantaneous age, and they want information now,” Halberstadt said. “The College can truly engage students by providing instant information.”

After months (okay, maybe weeks) of planning, I’m excited to announce the introduction of the College of the Liberal Arts iPad Summer Research Project (CLAISRP?  Perhaps this is an initiative that is better left without an acronym.) We in the Liberal Arts are already exploring the utility of the iPad for classroom use, thanks to the efforts of Stuart Selber.

According to Cathy N. Davidson, co-director of the annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions, fully 65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.

For those two-thirds of grade-school kids, if for no one else, it’s high time we redesigned American education.

What she recommends, in fact, looks much more like a classical education than it does the industrial-era holdover system that still informs our unrenovated classrooms.

Announcing AWS GovCloud, a new AWS Region designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. Previously, government agencies with data subject to compliance regulations such as the International Trade and Arms Regulation (ITAR), which governs how organizations manage and store defense-related data, were unable to process and store data in the cloud that the federal government mandated be accessible only by U.S. persons. Because AWS GovCloud is physically and logically accessible by U.S. persons only, government agencies can now manage more heavily regulated data in AWS while remaining compliant with strict federal requirements. The new Region offers the same high level of security as other AWS Regions and supports existing AWS security controls and certifications such as FISMA, SAS-70, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS Level 1. AWS also provides an environment that enables agencies to comply with HIPAA regulations. AWS resources deployed from AWS GovCloud such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) are available on-demand and agencies pay only for what they use, allowing the U.S. government to benefit from the flexibility, scalability and low pay-as-you-go pricing of AWS. Customers who are interested in learning more about the AWS GovCloud should contact their government sales representative by filling out the Contact Us form on the AWS GovCloud website.

As I was looking through my feeds this morning, I noticed a post from Karl Kapp in which he mentions a presentation by the Chapman Alliance, which talks about development costs for an hour of Elearning based on a survey.

This site is being used to explore to affordances of WordPress as a platform as it relates to teaching, learning, and research. We are just getting started, so expect things to change rapidly or to encounter the occasional glitch. You can use the “Log In” link in the horizontal menu bar at the very top of the page to get started.

The training of teachers is key, said Margaret Gayle, co-designer of the program and director of the American Association for Gifted Children at Duke. The program was designed to give teachers new skills tailored for advanced students. "They challenge students more; they do more with problem-based learning," she said. "They get a lot of higher-level instructional strategies, they know better how to motivate kids."

But the Eduventures survey found a gap between supply and demand: 19 percent of respondents said they were enrolled in blended programs, while 33 percent of prospective students listed that format as their preference. The report on the survey, which is not available free online, questions whether some students are being “forced” into studying entirely online because of a lack of hybrid programs. “Schools have jumped on the online bandwagon, and students end up with this rather unnuanced choice between more-or-less wholly on ground and more-or-less wholly online, when many of them actually want something that’s a more nuanced combination of the two,” says Richard Garrett, a managing director at Eduventures.

“Ultimately, we want ideas from the symposium to have a broad impact across the university,” he said.

Some of the key takeaways are: 38% of respondents agree or strongly agree that educators should use social media to reach students where they are, while 24% disagree or strongly disagree.  To me, the fact that 39% rated this item as "neutral" says that many faculty are still trying to figure this out.  58% agree or strongly agree that social media can be a valuable tool for collaborative learning, and 70% believe video, podcasts, blogs and wikis are valuable tools for teaching.80% of faculty reported that they were using social media in some aspect of a course that they are teaching.  A smaller number of respondents felt Facebook and Twitter had value in the classroom, though it was interesting to see that they rated Facebook as a tool that they use personally (57%) and professionally (45%) outside of class.  The statistic that really blew me away was the fact that 91% of faculty use social media either for professional purposes or in their classes, or both, and a similar study conducted by McKinsey of workplaces showed only 47% used it.  Are faculty in higher education more cutting edge than they are given credit for?  This statistic seems to indicate that. 

Language specialists at Indiana University have developed a new application for the iPad that will help people working in strategic areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan to read and write in Pashto, one of the region's primary languages.