Technology in Teaching and Learning

"We discuss our implementation of targeted pre-reading assignments with an associated online quiz in two science classes, one physics and one biology. Our goal was to create a pre-class assignment that helped students recognize the benefits of reading before class. Students were asked to take part in a survey about how and why they completed the pre-reading assignments. We found that 80% of students read the textbook on a regular basis, which is much higher than reported in previous studies. Also nearly 3/4 of students reported using productive strategies for completing the reading assignment and cited reading prior to class as being helpful to their learning. Student self-reports were checked against electronic logs and were found to be highly accurate. Moreover, these results were nearly identical between the physics and biology courses."

"EXECUTIVE SUMMARY A new business landscape is emerging wherein a multitude of small entities will bring products and services to market using the infrastructure and platforms of large, concentrated players. The forces driving this are putting new and mounting pressures on organizations and individuals while also opening up new opportunities. But traditional postsecondary educational institutions are not supporting individuals in successfully navigating this not-too-distant future, nor are the educational institutions immune to these forces. Perhaps more than any other sector, postsecondary education is being affected by changing demand as the learning needs and preferences of the individual consumer rapidly evolve. Increasingly, individuals need both lifelong learning and accelerated, on-demand learning, largely as a response to the pressures of the broader evolving economic landscape. Rarely seen amid gross national statistics on the skills gap, employability, completion rates, and tuition hikes is a serious discussion of the unmet, and increasingly disparate, needs and expectations of individual learners. The costs to the individual are increasing, and the payoff is less certain. Students of all ages are more comfortable with technology and are less tied to traditional notions of the academy as fewer American adults between the ages of 18 and 22 achieve a four-year, full-time, campus-based degree.1 At the same time, technological advances reduce the lifespan of specific skills, and an increasingly globalized and automated workforce needs to continuously learn and retrain."

"Jeremy Bailenson, who leads Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction lab, says that approach breaks new ground. Communication in virtual worlds has long been limited, he says, by a gap between how realistic an avatar could look and how realistically it could behave. "Second Life had fairly realistic faces, but there was no to way to control them," he says. "High Fidelity has solved that problem." When he recently tried Rosedale's technology, "the experience I got was 'It really feels like there's another person here,'" Bailenson says."

"One of Magic Leap's patents describes how such a device, dubbed a WRAP, for "waveguide reflector array projector," would operate. The display would be made up of an array of many small curved mirrors; light would be delivered to that array via optical fiber, and each of the tiny elements would reflect some of that light to create the light field for a particular point in 3-D space. The array could be semi-transparent to allow a person to see the real world at the same time."

"Everyone is tentatively venturing into a new landscape here. Most projects focus on the ability of Google Glass to capture first-person perspective and hands-free video, such as recording with Glass within and outside of the classroom. The same goes for the Narrative Clip, which works great for capturing images during field trips or lab experiments. I think that the most common applications will be students or faculty capturing video and, for the brave, some applications that can work for online teaching, videoconferencing and one-on-one sessions, such as connecting with experts and mentors to provide coaching and feedback. In addition, we are starting to see some interesting applications for students with disabilities, in which Google Glass or other wearables can provide visual, auditory and physical assistance."

"Why Wearables Are the New Gateways to Human Knowledge"

Data Analytics and Learning MOOC Visual Syllabus

Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it's a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn. Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and scientific markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless. For example: Learning a language Studying for medical and law exams Memorizing people's names and faces Brushing up on geography Mastering long poems Even practicing guitar chords!"