Group items tagged

Educational transformation is coming not because of the increasing ineffectiveness of schools in meeting society's needs - though that is certainly a good reason - but due to their growing unaffordability. We now see student-teacher ratios in some urban settings climbing to unworkable levels of 40 plus, even 60 pupils per class (Dolan, 2011; Dillon, 2011). This is not a temporary financial dislocation due to an economic downturn, but a permanent sea-change that has already happened in every other service sector of our economy.

The internationally recognized series of  Horizon Reports is part of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, a comprehensive research venture established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years on a variety of sectors around the globe. This volume, the  2011 Horizon Report, examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. It is the eighth in the annual series of reports focused on emerging technology in the higher education environment. 

Traditional use of the Web (i.e. non-mobile and non-video usage) is shrinking.  Per-person consumption of traditional Web content fell by 3 percent between March 2010 and March 2011 in terms of minutes. Within that shrinking slice of online time, Facebook is increasingly the portal for everything.  While the "document Web" (as author Ben Elowitz terms the old-style Web) shrank by 9 percent overall, Facebook consumption increased by 69 percent, essentially stealing time from everything else.  It now accounts for 1 out of every 8 minutes of online time, as opposed to 1 out of 13 at the beginning of the year.  Search engines, once the gatekeepers to the Web, are giving way to Facebook.  Google and everything it represents is facing the first stages of irrelevancy.

Five ways to use The New York Times to "flip" your classroom.

"Sadly, though web searches have become and integral part of the academic research landscape, the art of the Google search is an increasingly lost one. A recent study at Illinois Wesleyan University found that fewer than 25% of students could perform a "reasonably well-executed search.""

Every college teacher I know is bemoaning the same kind of thing. Whether it's rude behavior, lack of intellectual rigor, or both, we are all struggling with the same frightening decline in student performance and academic standards at institutions of higher learning. A sense of entitlement now pervades the academy, excellence be damned.

This is from March of 2011??? Keith, did you post it because it resonates with what you're seeing in Florida now? I don't think this rudeness describes Albany State U, just the obvious unpreparedness of the students. Our writing lab specialists do encounter demanding students sometimes, but I think it's fairly rare, and I haven't heard of extended bad feelings.

Here are some crucial tips for refining your Googling, as well as some other great places to hunt down that last study you need for your thesis.

Flipping a classroom is not a teaching technique, it is more in line with a philosophy or way of teaching. It involves using technology as a tool, not the main focus, for helping students increase their understanding of science or math concepts.

A study just published in Science magazine sure makes one think twice about how we deliver "content knowledge" the classroom. The method by which a course is taught, it indicates, may be even more important than the instructor's background.

Digital higher education - both its software and content - has managed to remain untouched by good design. Design is not even on the agenda. The importance of design to digital education starts with this simple fact: by moving the locus of education from the classroom to the digital environment, we necessarily change the factors that determine the quality of the student's experience. In the digital environment, design plays a far more important role as a determinant of quality than it does in the classroom.

For centuries, researchers have studied the brain to find exactly where mechanisms for producing and interpreting language reside. Theories abound on how humans acquire new languages and how our developing brains learn to process languages. We take a look at the mysteries of language and the brain in the infographic below.

high school and college students may be "digital natives" but they're wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the author's credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can't read. Today the question is why can't Johnny search?

thinking about [learning] in connectivism terms is not about changing what I do or how I teach, but changing what I believe is happening and how it is happening.

Tips for better Google searches.

Shelly Blake-Plock

according to Dr. Gary Small, a neuroscientist & professor at UCLA, who spoke at the Learning & the Brain Conference, "The technology train has left. You have to deal with it, understand it, and get some perspective."

I'm more convinced than ever that blogging and doing it with other students from around the world is essential to helping students connect with themselves and a larger world.