PSU TLT

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.

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

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."

Squarespace is the only blogging platform on the web with a custom importing system designed to attack the nasty details of seamlessly and completely moving your blog. Our system goes beyond just importing all of your blog posts and comments -- we ensure that all your media is moved over, URLs remain working, and that all of your data comes with you -- where it belongs .

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.

Are Your Teachers Ready? Successful one-to-one computing initiatives aren’t as simple as just passing out devices to each student. One-to-one computing requires rethinking how instruction happens, how resources are accessed and allocated. Are your school’s teachers ready for not just one-to-one computing — a huge shift in itself — but for one-to-one computing that’s solely focused on Web resources? Are you using Web-based applications, for example? How much does your school rely on software installed on machines, and can you make the transition to other online tools instead?

“Students are totally shameless about how they use their computers in class,’’ said David Jones, an MIT professor. “I fantasize about having a Wi-Fi jammer in my lecture halls to block access to distractions.’’While MIT has yet to unwire a single lecture hall, some law schools, including the University of Chicago’s, have in recent years blocked wireless access in classrooms to keep students engaged in Socratic discussions instead of their classmates’ Groupon and eBay activitie

This is undoubtedly a good idea, but it’s not the full picture of what needs to happen. What’s the answer? Rather than having different sites for each format, the way forward is to have designs that work equally as well on a tablet/touch format as they do on your laptop.

What did Capecchi do? He took the NIH's money, and, ignoring their admonitions, he poured almost all of it into his risky gene-targeting project. It was, he recalls, a big gamble. If he hadn't been able to show strong enough initial results in the three-to-five-year time scale demanded by the NIH, they would have cut off his funding. Without their seal of approval, he might have found it hard to get funding from elsewhere. His career would have been severely set back, his research assistants looking for other work. His laboratory might not have survived.In 2007, Mario Capecchi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for this work on mouse genes. As the NIH's expert panel had earlier admitted, when agreeing to renew his funding: "We are glad you didn't follow our advice."

Whichever way they sliced the data, Azoulay, Manzo and Zivin found evidence that the more open-ended, risky HHMI grants were funding the most important, unusual, and influential research. HHMI researchers, apparently no better qualified than their NIH-funded peers, were far more influential, producing twice as many highly cited research articles. They were more likely to win awards and more likely to train students who themselves won awards.

The HHMI researchers also produced more failures; a higher proportion of their research papers were cited by nobody at all. No wonder: The NIH program was designed to avoid failure, while the HHMI program embraced it. And in the quest for truly original research, some failure is inevitable.

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!

"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.

Sprint officials reasoned that colleges would flock to the free version of the software, Mobile Learn. And because only Sprint customers could use the software with Android, BlackBerry and Palm phones, college students would have a powerful incentive to sign up with Sprint.

Sprint asked a judge to bar Blackboard from allowing its free iPhone and iPad versions to use wireless networks.

The exact amount is unclear, but Sprint will eventually owe more than $50-million that it has not already paid, Blackboard said in a court document. Sprint must pay Blackboard $2 per month for every student who has downloaded Mobile Learn for Sprint, in addition to millions in other fees, the document says.