Archive for the ‘Change & Innovation’ Category

Greg Ferenstein at Mashable discusses How Twitter in the Classroom is Boosting Student Engagement by increasing participation and building a community of learners.

“Professors who wish to engage students during large lectures face an uphill battle. Not only is it a logistical impossibility for 200+ students to actively participate in a 90 minute lecture, but the downward sloping cone-shape of a lecture hall induces a one-to-many conversation. This problem is compounded by the recent budget cuts that have squeezed ever more students into each room.

Fortunately, educators (including myself) have found that Twitter is an effective way to broaden participation in lecture. Additionally, the ubiquity of laptops and smartphones have made the integration of Twitter a virtually bureaucracy-free endeavor. This post describes the two main benefits professors find when using Twitter in lecture.”

Greg Ferenstein at Mashable blogs about How Social Gaming is Improving Education. The article discusses how schools are replacing textbook learning with social video games, and improving learning outcomes.

“Social gaming has a come a long way from the days when a dozen students would squint at a 10-inch screen of Oregon Trail. The 2000s seemed to be the decade of case studies: Bold educators willing to experiment with developing technologies. But now, the involvement of major funders, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, points to an industry that is on the cusp of freeing education from its 2D textbook prison.”

It’s always interesting to see the unique ways that researchers and educators find to use new social media tools. Jeff Young at Wired Campus reports on the TwHistory group who are retelling historical events in real-time on Twitter based on journals and histories in What Lincoln Would Have Tweeted.

“A graduate student at Utah State University is a new kind of Civil War re-enactor. Instead of dressing up in period clothes, the student, Tom Caswell, uses Twitter to send short messages in the voice of Abraham Lincoln and other historical figures.

Mr. Caswell is one of the organizers of TwHistory, a Web site devoted to historical re-enactments via Twitter. For their first event, they staged the battle of Gettysburg in the voices of a handful of key characters, including Lincoln (whose famous speech there is, appropriately, famous for its brevity).”

The 2009 EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee has identified five technology trends which impact higher education which include cyberinfrastructure and high-performance computing, open-source learning management systems, product managers in IT organizations, information resource management technologies for libraries, and IT service management. What Technology? Reflections on Evolving Services summarizes the key findings of the committee.

“These white papers address many other strategic areas for each evolving technology: key questions to ask; the implementation challenges; the major vendors and how to judge among them; how to proceed and the issues to be addressed; and the likely impacts in the next three to five years.”

Jeff Young at The Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Wired Campus asks: Could Google Wave Replace Course-Management Systems?

“Google argues that its new Google Wave system could replace e-mail by blending instant messaging, wikis, and image and document sharing into one seamless communication interface. But some college professors and administrators are more excited about Wave’s potential to be a course-management-system killer.”

On October 2nd, Educause will offer a free live Web seminar Emerging Technologies in Higher Education: Big School Solutions to Small School Problems. Presenter John O’Keefe, Director of Academic Technologies and Network Services at Lafayette College will discuss “major developments over the past five years (from Shibboleth to Internet2 to MPLS to iTunes U) that can help smaller schools both address and transform their technology needs.”

Derek Law from the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow Scotland has written Academic Digital Libraries of the Future: An Environment Scan for the New Review of Academic Librarianship. It is available for free download for a limited time.

“Libraries are attempting to face a future in which almost every fixed point has disappeared. Users are changing; content is changing; research is taking new forms. Indeed the very need for libraries is being questioned in some quarters. This paper explores the nature of the changes and challenges facing higher education libraries and suggests key areas of strength and core activities which should be exploited to secure their future.”

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

Educause has published a quick guide to 7 things you should know about Federated Identity Management. This helpful guide provides info about enterprise identity management systems which enable users to sign into multiple resources, ie. email, learning management systems, library databases, etc. with a single digital identity. The brief answers the following questions:

1. What is it?
2. Who’s doing it?
3. How does it work?
4. Why is it significant?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for higher education?

A new project from the MIT Media Lab called Personas will create a data portrait of your online identity. You simply enter your name and it searches the Web for information and context and computes a visual representation of how the Internet sees you.

The New York Times Bits Blog discusses a 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education which concludes “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” The report looks at comparative studies of traditional vs. online learning from 1996-2008, mainly in higher education settings.

“The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.”

Josh Catone at Mashable suggests 3 Reasons Students Aren’t Ready for Digital Textbooks. And from his observations it seems that digital textbooks have some major hurdles to overcome before they’re ready for mass adoption such as:

• Cost Savings Must be Greater
• A Standard Format is Needed
• Questions of Ownership

The UK’s Guardian newspaper covers some of the changes happening in today’s libraries with Louise Tickle’s Academic libraries are undergoing a quiet revolution. The article proposes that “Being a librarian these days is all about technology and customer service; no time to stick your nose in a book”.

“Applying for a job in a university library because you “love reading” isn’t going to get you very far these days. These hallowed repositories of academic knowledge have changed beyond recognition over the last decade, and the people recruited to work in them have to be willing to embrace new technologies and customer service with an alacrity that would likely horrify the shushing custodians of the past.”

Kate Sheehan writes a thoughtful article about The Digital Divide Inside the Library for the ALA TechSource blog. Sheehan discusses the need for a strong technology skill set among reference librarians in addition to public service experience.

“Libraries need change and we need to get better and quicker at adapting–there isn’t room for actual luddites in the library. But when it comes to working with our colleagues, I think we’re headed toward a double standard. We need our front line staff to understand tech, to be sure, and even in the short time that I’ve been a librarian, I’ve seen huge leaps forward in that area. Tech savvy is increasingly like public service experience–it’s something organizations are unwilling to take a chance on. We expect librarians to keep up with tech and be willing to learn more about it, but we’re less skilled at differentiating between problematic resistance to change and thoughtfulness.”

via Jill Hurst-Wahl

Dana Oshiro at ReadWriteWeb posts about Seven e-Learning and Teaching Resources. This useful list includes services such as Edmodo, the private microblogging application for schools, YouTube EDU which aggregates videos and channels from colleges and universities, and LearnHub, a network where schools can create their own virtual classrooms and students can complete assignments.

ReadWriteWeb takes a look at disruptions in the book publishing business in a two-part post which discusses three big waves hitting the industry including; the digitization of back catalogs, e-books, and print on demand. Bits Of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business Part One introduces these waves while Part Two takes a look at what this means for the major players including; readers, authors, printers, publishers, retailers, and e-book device vendors.