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"Despite our best efforts, presentations can sometimes turn into one-way communication- us talking and students passively listening. You may be stationed at the front of the classroom, perhaps using PowerPoint slides or showing a video on a screen, while the class follows along silently in their seats. Or, any discussion that is generated might be dominated by the verbal few, with quieter students too intimidated to jump in. Also, when you look at the multiple studies that indicate the brevity of a student's attention span, ranging from two to ten minutes, a lengthy presentation can lose the audience it was designed to teach."

"Many view Blackboard as the embodiment of everything wrong with education technology: it's old-fashioned, it's hard to use, and once a school system has bought into it, it's even harder to get rid of."

Maybe there's hope?????? "Which is why, since joining the company in 2012, Bhatt has vowed to refocus Blackboard's products to serve the students who use them and not just the IT administrators who buy them. Now he's ready to show the world just how he plans to do that. Later today, Bhatt will take the stage at the company's annual BbWorld Conference, where he will announce the launch of the company's redesigned core products and the introduction of new ones, all of which aim to make Blackboard a service that its 100 million existing users actually want to use."

"The concept of meta-communication suggests that the form of the communication, its nonverbal elements, begin to define the teacher-student relationship. So what relationship do I want with my students? What kind of first impression am I interested in making through my syllabus?"

What a great resource, and yes, the all important first impression is the syllabus. A good way to look at it.

What we're seeing most recently, and what I'm very excited about, is going from that linear model to a much more non-linear idea. The digital learning experience is becoming really a collection of inter-related learning nuggets, that you might take very different paths through, depending who you are and what your needs are, and how you learn most effectively.

" [This approach] is really not trying to mimic what we would do in the physical world, but starting from an entirely digital form, and really being very thoughtful about what the learning outcomes are that we're trying to achieve, and how can the technology enable us to achieve those outcomes. There are many things that are very different about how you would design learning and work, if you really are doing it from a digital-first standpoint. In trying to do the latter, what are some of the principles you keep coming back to? "

USA Today, "The place where the video game was invented more than 50 years ago now wants to teach teachers, entrepreneurs and students how to design games for learning - and it is hoping that the end result will be a new kind of tech tool for the classroom." The VCU ALT Lab now has an area for the exploration of games as a means of learning. The MIT online courses might be a good springboard for conversation and experiments in the ALTLab.

It's been two years since a New York Times article declared the "year of the MOOC" -short for "massive open online courses." Now, for the first time, researchers have carried out a detailed study that shows that these classes really can teach at least as effectively as traditional classroom courses - and they found that this is true regardless of how much preparation and knowledge students start out with.

"In this "Profiles in Learning," Joe Cates, Ph.D., Assistant Professor University College, discusses Civic Engagement and the duties we have being an urban university, intertwined within the city of Richmond. This allows the students to actively engage with one another and inquire about topics related to their community."

There is in his syllabus no compromise with expediency, no taking for granted of power structures, nothing but rigorous honesty and tireless interrogation; there is some feeling or hope that if you could put every single thing under the sun into words you can head off sorrow, frustration, resentment, missed communication, thwarted ambition. Wallace refuses the habitual patterns and usual fictions that govern a classroom. His syllabus warns: "If you are used to whipping off papers the night before they're due, running them quickly through the computer's Spellchecker, handing them in full of high-school errors and sentences that make no sense and having the professor accept them 'because the ideas are good' or something, please be informed that I draw no distinction between the quality of one's ideas and the quality of those ideas' verbal expression, and I will not accept sloppy, rough-draftish, or semiliterate college writing. Again, I am absolutely not kidding."

great ideas here, esp the one on schema roller.

"Experts were realizing that disciplinary expertise and research prowess were no guarantee that a professor could teach. Some colleges were devising alternatives to rote learning, helping students integrate knowledge from different subjects, or challenging them with courses on contemporary problems. Teaching was finally going to matter."

Facilitation has its own challenges. One was in facilitating collaborative work among the students. "There're a lot of assumptions made about students, that they're able to interact naturally in a group," Shen observes. "Even though you give them roles, you assume the leader will always know how to play the role of a leader, but not necessarily so." "We had to teach them group work skills too," she adds. "It's learning for both the teachers and the students."

Fascinating to read the comment thread on this piece, too.

Does space matter?

Interesting commentary that could be applied to the classroom as well.