Group items tagged

January 2011. Lots of mental anguish in the McLeod household. The job may be the best professional setup I’ll ever get. But it’s not the right time to move our family from Ames, Iowa. What to do, what to do? Think outside the box! Pitch UK a ‘global worker’ proposal. 90% of my work is online / electronic anyway. Can I remain in Ames and fly to Lexington a few days a month to take care of the rest? We wait anxiously, fingers and toes crossed. UK says YES!

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.

Students are allocated 110 subsidized sheets each semester, paid for by the Information Technology fee. You may purchase more sheets at any time.

Here is a chart of how many sheets we charge for different types of print jobs.

"Narrate, Curate, Share" is the framework in place for the upcoming fall semester as the Virginia Tech Center for Innovation in Learning partners with Tech's new Honors Residential College to bring 21st-century innovation to the tradition of residential learning with a program-wide blogging initiative.

Evolving the E-Portfolio at Penn State By Bridget McCrea04/06/11 Pennsylvania State University's foray into e-portfolios started about 10 years ago, when static Web pages were used to store and display online versions of student resumes. Fairly innovative for their time, these early e-portfolios gave way to more dynamic versions of themselves a few years back as the university began rolling in Web 2.0 technologies. "When blogs, social networking and other interactive technologies came along, we tweaked our e-portfolio initiative," said Jeff Swain, innovation consultant for the university. "We wanted students to be able to develop interactive, online portfolios that would be able to stay and grow with them throughout their college careers, and beyond."

If kids can get the lectures, can get the content delivery and skill modeling as well (or often better) by computer lecture than in person, why do we have use precious class-time for this purpose?  Why do we, in the status quo,  replicate in person in our classrooms what is easily available elsewhere, the content delivery/skill modeling, and then have kids apply their learning to difficult problems at home, without us there to help? Increasingly,  education’s value-add is and will be in the coaching and troubleshooting when students are applying their learning, and in challenging students to apply their thinking to hands-on learning by doing and teaming:  so let’s have them do these things in class, not sit and listen.   We know that collaboration is a critical skill set which can’t be developed easily either on-line or at home alone– let’s have students learn it with us in our classrooms.   Let every classroom be a collaborative problem solving laboratory or studio.

My sense, from my marketing experience, is that those providing some product or service too often wish to be the ones defining what a product is or how it is used. They forget that it's the user, and it can only be the user, each individual independent user, that defines a product's value. Therefore, whatever products, services, means, TLT hopes to provide to students and faculty is, to a great extent, out of our control. The final use, the final value, can only exist in the mind of the person served. Likewise the resulting network isn't something that's defined in advance, but one that develops from each person participating in conversation.

While certain metrics are valuable and have their place, number of workstations, number of log-ins, number of postings and comments on blogs, those things are and will remain items that are only important to TLT itself. What is more important, and much more difficult to define and measure, is how value in the mind of faculty and students is satisfied.

Kim told me he wants to enable anyone to build their own portfolio of educational content – to build hundreds of Khan Academies. That’s a goal that puts teacher- and student-generated content at the center of education, one enabled by a simple, but smoothly functioning app — all on a portable device.

At the same time as many educators are rethinking the hardware involved with instruction, some are rethinking other ways in technology can change the classroom. Some are experimenting with the “flipped classroom” — the idea, made quite famous lately thanks to Khan Academy, that videotaped instruction can be assigned as homework, while in-class time can be used for more personalized remediation, for collaboration among teachers and students, and for the types of exercises that have typically been seen as homework. A new app taps into both of these phenomena: bringing an interactive whiteboard-like experience to the iPad and to the Web and making it easy for iPad owners to create their own instructional videos.

Below is the process we will follow for peer review in this class. This post will take you through the following steps: 1.) Emailing your draft to your peer reviewer 2.) Opening your peer's draft in iAnnotate and adding your comments 3.) Emailing your comments to your peer, and 4.) Turning in your commented draft.