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along with the whole generational differences in learning (netgen, etc) angle, learning styles have always seemed suspect. perhaps it's the way it has been communicated, but regardless I thought this story was an interesting one.

Article calls out PSU on its technology policies. Interesting to think about how we might go about fixing it or if students are just bound to be upset about the next thing instead.

I was in a meeting with housing folks when I started at SITE. They wanted to run some data to try and help figure out why so many students decided not to stay in campus housing after the freshman year. It doesn't take much data mining...you just have to look at the bandwidth limits and policy, and you have the bulk of your answer. For some reason they couldn't accept that students would move out because of a bandwidth cap.

I think all the LMS/CMS venders could use help in the social, bottom up world of collaboration around learning.

Great article on Learning Analytics. I respectfully disagree with Gardner Campbell's quote, but I do see where he's coming from and that is something that universities need to be careful of.

Despite the iPad's popularity-Apple has sold nearly 15 million of them and just came out with the iPad2; and there are dozens of competitors, like the Samsung Galaxy-early studies indicate that these finger-based tablets are passive devices that have limited use in higher education. They are great for viewing media and allow students to share readings. But professors cannot use them to mark up material on the fly and show changes to students in response to their questions, a type of interactivity that has been a major thrust in pedagogy.

I think Stuart Selber would disagree with many of the limitations pointed out in this article. Most of the criticisms can be easily overcome with an app or accessory such as a stylus, bluetooth keyboard, or an app like iAnnotate. The people who were interviewed may have lacked the support of a good technologist.

I hope that lifelong access becomes the new norm. I keep hearing publishing companies talking about online textbooks with access that would be limited to a set period (a semester or six months). That's fine if you're taking a single course that you don't really care about - but I don't want students to feel that way about their learning. Courses build upon each other. Good reference materials should serve a purpose for years, not months.

I returned many of mine, but kept the foundation books that I'd need for other courses - calculus, mechanics, chemistry, etc... Many of them were used for more than one course (e.g. Math 140 and 141). I'd hate to have to buy the same book twice and then not have it afterward for other courses.

I think that's typically what these students do in the focus group, but it was all about 'having the option' to keep the book at the end of the course. Might be some sort of perception of options thing going on here. The other popular comment was "I look at computer screens all day, I definitely don't want to look at a computer screen to read fine print another 1-2 hours a day". A couple students really bashed their profs about the quality of PDFs they are putting online, meaning that profs are STILL photocopying PDFs from journals, that cut words from a column and are angled funny in the PDF. Claimed these were unreadable online and they had to print them out to 'guess' at some of the words and fill them in by hand.

Ugh - the title got me. I was hoping it would be more of a post about changing the way we're thinking about educational technologies. It's more of a review of education technology companies and conferences.

Textbook app offers access to a catalog of 70,000 college- and university-level electronic textbooks from major textbook publishers. Kno reported it will offer books at 30 percent to 50 percent off list prices through the Kno Store. Other e-learning features of the Textbooks for iPad app include: A social networking feature called Words to Friends that connects students via Facebook and Twitter; Text highlighting; Sticky notes; Chapter previews; and Support for downloading and reading PDFs from the Web.

John Dolan sent me a note about this as well. He said that Stuart is interested in the Kno, but may not have a lot of time to examine it. John said that he would contact the other people involved with the Digital Research group in Liberal Arts. I have downloaded the app, but haven't used it yet.

I'd like to play around with it a bit to see what is has to offer... was thinking for Stuart's projects in particular. Maybe I'll bring it up with Stuart and Michael at our meeting next week. I guess the next step is seeing if the texts we use are even available.

anyone familiar with Learning Catalytics? sounds like it's invite-only, but might be worth a look.

an engagement initiative seems like a good idea. many of the approaches are implementations of active learning strategies, and I think having faculty from multiple disciplines exploring and sharing is a good way to test the effectiveness of various approaches. we just met with faculty from architectural engineering who've been flipping since 2008. one observation they made was that they flipped to allow student teams to work on group projects during class time. I had always thought that was a good idea for logistical purposes (especially in a team-heavy college like engineering), but they made a point I had not thought of: using classroom flip in that manner also allowed for the teams to have access to faculty advice and guidance while they were meeting to work on their projects. that seems like it may have huge benefits, especially at key points in a group assignment. all a long way of saying, there's much to learn. the blended learning initiative was essentially a 'classroom flip' approach as well, so some of the ways faculty adapted instruction for those courses might be relevant here too.

Angela: Let's talk about it. Gary: Tapping into first-hand experience would be great. I know a bit from the National Conference on Academic Transformation conference. The example that comes to mind is a flip where students learn about math through some short (5 minute) video tutorials and then attend "class" in a lab environment to work in teams and get access to the GA and faculty. It taps into a lot of the features of "student engagement" as measured by the National Survey on Student Engagement with factors such as increased student-student work, collaborative problem solving, immediate feedback, and increased student-faculty contact. Overall, an excellent design.

"Museum of the City of New York -- New York, NY HD 51480, Improving Digital Record Annotation Capabilities with Open sourced Ontologies and Crowd sourced Workers Lacy Schutz, Project Director Outright: $50,000 To support: The development of methods and tools to facilitate the description of digitized primary sources by combining "crowdsourcing" tactics with linked open data and semantic Web technologies."

Interesting list of grant awards in the humanities. The quoted one above jumped out at me, but there are plenty of other good ideas in there. I'd be interested to see what others think.

"Eighty-seven percent of college students surveyed said they considered their institution's technology when selecting their college. This finding is also reflected in CDW-G's 21st-Century Classroom Report, which looked at educational technology in K-12 and found that 92 percent of current high school students say technology is an important consideration as they evaluate colleges. "

Oh - and it reminds me of the University of Michigan learning spaces designs - Cole took pictures. I think it's their North Quad.

I wasn't able to download the report w/o creating an account, but I'm curious *what* technologies are important to students as it pertains to selecting a university. Another highlight claimed that both faculty and students find 'virtual learning' and 'e-reader/mobile technologies' important. Not sure if those are the top 2 things kids look at when selecting a university...I would find that somewhat hard to believe. I know bandwidth cap still plays a role here in terms of on-campus housing post freshman year. Wonder if that also plays a role in university selection.

Amazing trend happening with open and online courses. This is the second one of these I have heard about in a week. Maybe we need to try something similar with CI597?

good discussion about this course from CS faculty. they bring up some excellent points and have a healthy skepticism about the project: http://computinged.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/stanford-on-line-ai-course-draws-58000-but-is-it-real/

"Global Social Problems" course where students are asked to take on the role of a superhero and save the world through research, hands-on work on a local social issue, and imagining a solution to a broader social problem.

Doesn't look like a massively-open online course, but makes me think about setting up one of our own. I love how all of this (assignments, discussion, etc...) is completely exposed. With a course like this, I don't see the need for an LMS.

Interesting idea ... I've seen a lot of these kinds of features proposed in the emerging eText area.

GradeGuru is specifically designed to do this. http://www.gradeguru.com/home We took a look at it. Interesting idea - ratings of quality notes and note takers with the ability for top performers to earn real rewards. They proposed a cost of something like $2/enrollment/semester though - just not a model that would work for us.

Really smart idea ... might be worth considering as a partnership between TLT and Schreyer Institute?

It's a creative idea. It reminds me of the finals week survival kits that parents could buy for their kids (through Residence Life). I like that it includes key phone numbers and a dry erase marker.

infographic about classroom flip use case in K12.

Very nice. I want to put that up on a wall somewhere to get people thinking about the idea.

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.

This is another market the iPad is disrupting. The previous devices to address this were incredibly expensive and bulky.

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.