PSU Schreyer Institute

A free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence, to be taught this fall by two leading experts from Silicon Valley, has attracted more than 58,000 students around the globe — a class nearly four times the size of Stanford’s entire student body

The online students will not get Stanford grades or credit, but they will be ranked in comparison to the work of other online students and will receive a “statement of accomplishment.”

For example, the Khan Academy, which focuses on high school and middle school, intentionally turns the relationship of the classroom and homework upside down. Students watch lectures at home, then work on problem sets in class, where the teacher can assist them one on one.

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Faculty, staff, and students interested in the innovative and cutting edge use of educational technology are invited to attend a talk by Jim Groom, instructional technology specialist and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington, Sept. 20 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. at Foster Auditorium in Pattee Library. Jim Groom is an instructional technology specialist and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington an innovative thinker in the field of educational technology. Groom developed the highly recognized academic blogging platform at University of Mary Washington. This platform has been used to create class sites, e-portfolios and other web-based resources ranging from English, linguistics and speech blogs to online literary journals. Groom also created DS106, a free, open, online digital storytelling course that anyone can take. The course is like no other online course, with the following course objectives: Develop skills in using technology as a tool for networking, sharing, narrating, and creative self-expression Frame a digital identity wherein you become both a practitioner in and interrogator of various new modes of networking Critically examine the digital landscape of communication technologies as emergent narrative forms and genres

Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases.

"People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at,"

"This was really kind of a last-ditch effort," he recalled. "Can the Foldit players really solve it?"They could. "They actually did it in less than 10 days,"

The search process was undertaken on 5 January 2009. Using the “advanced search” feature available on ISI Web of Science, SSCI and AHCI were searched using the keywords blog*, weblog* and web log* (trunctuated so as to find different usage of the basic word, such as blogs, bloggers, blogging, etc.). This indentified papers that focus on blogs but also those that examine blogs in relation with other media. As for temporal limits, all articles published before 1 January 2009, were considered for inclusion. In total, 311 articles were identified.

What sets Google+ (hereafter “G+”) from Facebook is the plural of that word “circles.” When you start creating a friend list on G+, you’re asked to add that person to one or more “Circles.” You start out with a few circles titled “Friends,” “Family,” “Acquaintances,” and so on. But you’re welcome to create as many as you want and add each person to as many circles as you want.

“Hangouts” are essentially group video chats; when you start a Hangout, you can let as many of your different circles know as you’d like and then people are free to simply drop in.

The authors of two recent studies of laptops and classroom learning decided that relying on student and professor testimony would not do. They decided instead to spy on students.

The average student in the Vermont study cycled through a whopping 65 new, active windows per lecture, nearly two-thirds of which were classified as “distractive.” (One student averaged 174 new windows per lecture.) But only one type of distractive application appeared to have any effect on how well students ended up doing on assessments: instant messaging.

In particular, most students appear to place little value on WBLT, however a small minority value them very highly. Further research is necessary to identify more carefully the students who value WBLT highly, and whether the gain to these students warrants widespread use of WBLT.

Our survey also included a final open ended question "If iLecture was not available next semester, how would that affect you?" Most students responded briefly to this question. Out of the 130 comments made by students, 54% responded with sentiments such as "not much" or "no effect" and 26% indicated it would make their revisions harder or difficult if they could not understand the face to face lectures. This provides qualitative confirmation of our quantitative results. Most students place no or little value on WBLT.

"All medical school professors can view all medical school courses, carte blanche," says Coffman of the setup at WVU Health Sciences. "And part of their job is to review each other's content, to make sure they're not teaching the same thing and that something isn't getting missed. That's something lecture capture has enabled."At Grand Rapids CC, says Brand, the technology has also been useful for creating short tutorials for faculty development, and for evaluating the performance of students in an online instructor-certification course.

Ultimately, though, the benefits of lecture capture--freeing up extra time for class discussion, as a study aid, and improving faculty performance--have one primary goal: to improve student learning.