Red Balloon Resources

"The current state of student learning in American colleges and universities leaves much to be desired. To be sure, the evidence about whether students are learning is fragmentary, imperfect, and discouraging. Most distressing are the results of the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey and the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, which show that average literacy levels among adults with bachelor's degrees have declined over time. That's on top of the fact that the overall level is low: On average, four-year college graduates have only an "intermediate" level of literacy, meaning that they are capable of doing only "moderately challenging literacy activities." Further, data collected from the National Survey of America's College Students-which used the literacy survey-show that "20 percent of U.S. college students completing four-year degrees-and 30 percent of students earning two-year degrees-have only basic quantitative literacy skills, meaning they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies.""

College tuitions are rising. Seat space-especially in community colleges-is often scarce. University endowments are shrinking. State institutions are facing enormous cuts in state funding. While colleges have fewer resources, they are admitting students who present greater challenges. Increasing numbers of students arrive on campus without the preparation to do college-level work. An estimated 42 percent of students at public two-year institutions and 28 percent of all students nationally take at least one remedial class. Yet at too many universities, classes are taught in much the same way as they were 50-or even 500-years ago. Students crowd into lecture halls to hear long uninterrupted lectures. Later, they discuss the course material in smaller sections taught by faculty or graduate assistants. Some institutions, however, are finding new ways to teach all students. A new Education Sector report, The Course of Innovation: Using Technology to Transform Higher Education, highlights the ways that colleges and universities are using technology to simultaneously improve student learning and reduce skyrocketing higher education costs.

"A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube Are his 10-minute lectures the future? Salman Khan, a former financial analyst, has created 1,400 educational videos and posted them to YouTube. "My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he says. By Jeffrey R. Young The most popular educator on YouTube does not have a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of his lectures from a bedroom closet. This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phenomenon-and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed educational system. "My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he told me recently. The resulting videos don't look or feel like typical college lectures or any of the lecture videos that traditional colleges put on their Web sites or YouTube channels. For one thing, these lectures are short-about 10 minutes each. And they're low-tech: Viewers see only the scrawls of equations or bad drawings that Mr. Khan writes on his digital sketchpad software as he narrates."

"The Better-Mousetrap Problem By Kevin Carey Discussions of technology and higher education tend to veer from "This. Changes. Everything" techno-triumphalism to assertions that using the Internet to educate people is clearly a plot to turn higher education into a cheap corporate commodity on par with bulk packages of frozen french fries. As is often the case, the most interesting work in the field right now sits close to the equipoise between the two, as my colleague Ben Miller documents in his new report, The Course of Innovation, which you should read. The report focuses on the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), which has spent the last decade working with scores of colleges and universities to transform mostly introductory college courses with technology. NCAT's track record is impressive. To the extent that such things can be proven without elaborate randomized control trials, they've proven that thoughtful, faculty-driven course redesign can simultaneously improve student learning and reduce per-student costs. Not by a little, either: Many colleges have cut costs by over 50 percent and improved learning in the bargain. NCAT's suite of course transformation models have proved effective in a wide variety of subjects and settings, from rural community colleges to Research I universities, in courses ranging from math and foreign language to composition and women's studies. (I've written previously about NCAT success stories here and here.) Yet in many ways the most interesting part of the NCAT story isn't the colleges that have adopted these proven methods. It's the colleges that haven't-i.e., most colleges. NCAT has built a better mousetrap, but the world hasn't beaten a path to its door. This is despite the fact that the mousetrap in question improves student learning and cuts costs in a time when colleges are constantly being harangued by policy makers about learning and the economic environment has left many institutions desperately sear

"Humans: Why They Triumphed How did one ape 45,000 years ago happen to turn into a planet dominator? The answer lies in an epochal collision of creativity. By Matt Ridley By MATT RIDLEY [EVOLUTION] Masterfile Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years-the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success-tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language-seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands of years and the ecological impact of people was minimal. Then suddenly-bang!-culture exploded, starting in Africa. Why then, why there? The answer lies in a new idea, borrowed from economics, known as collective intelligence: the notion that what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural change of a population is the amount of interaction between individuals. Even as it explains very old patterns in prehistory, this idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead-because ideas are having sex with each other as never before. The more scientists discover, the bigger the evolution puzzle has become. Tool-making itself

The Rise of Crowd Science 2 David Klammer for The Chronicle Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch schoolteacher, made a major astronomy discovery with a public Web site of telescope images. Today, data sharing in astronomy isn't just among professors. Amateurs are invited into the data sets through friendly Web interfaces, and a schoolteacher in Holland recently made a major discovery, of an unusual gas cloud that might help explain the life cycle of quasars-bright centers of distant galaxies-after spending part of her summer vacation gazing at the objects on her computer screen. Crowd Science, as it might be called, is taking hold in several other disciplines, such as biology, and is rising rapidly in oceanography and a range of environmental sciences. "Crowdsourcing is a natural solution to many of the problems that scientists are dealing with that involve massive amounts of data," says Haym Hirsh, director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. Findings have just grown too voluminous and complex for traditional methods, which consisted of storing numbers in spreadsheets to be read by one person, says Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist and director of the University of Washington eScience Institute. So vast data-storage warehouses, accessible to many researchers, are going up in several scholarly fields to try to keep track of the wealth of information."

"To address these changes, the Council of Australian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT, http://www.caudit.edu.au/), the U.S.-based EDUCAUSE (http://www.educause.edu/), the United Kingdom's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/), and the Netherlands' SURFfoundation (http://www.surffoundation.nl/en/) undertook a collaborative visioning of the future of higher education. Although information technology is the focus of all four of these associations, the resulting white paper (from which this article is drawn) explores higher education overall, not just information technology.2 The value of information technology lies in the activities it supports, which span virtually every college and university system for managing finances, learning, research, security, sustainability, and more. IT professionals thus need to understand the larger issues faced by their institutions: the drivers of change and the enablers, themes, and questions for the future."

"As scholars, we are always involved in one project or another. Whether it is a funded grant project, a writing project, development (as in web/game/interactive/software/etc), or even curriculum/teaching work, it often becomes quite a challenge to manage things (especially if many collaborators are involved). In situations such as these, many of us turn to tools that can keep our projects well managed and under control-some tools are online, some desktop, some tools are open source, and some are proprietary. All are different, with strengths and weaknesses which will ultimately determine their value to your particular scholarly project. Among the vast cornucopia of collaboratively inclined options, I would like to suggest that people have a look at Open Atrium. The brainchild of Development Seed, Open Atrium is essentially an intranet in a box. It allows for the creation of group/project spaces in which users can have conversations, preserve knowledge, track progress, and share files."