Learning

I see that Blackboard recently improved its LMS by adding an outcomes widget. Outcomes. Assessment. A culture of assessment. Continuous assessment. I'm not sure that it really matters what one teaches; the teacher's mission is to engage in a culture of continuous assessment.

I keep hearing that to live the life of assessment (or is the life of outcomes?) the teacher must have specific goals and objectives and how one measures the outcome of the goals and objectives and that this is best achieved by stuffing things into a rubric. Why does the word "rubric" always sound obscene? At any rate I think of a rubric as three-dimensional though I find it odd that the people who most often speak of rubrics are fairly two-dimensional people.

Presumably all this outcomes measurements activities goingson have to do with taking minds and adding to them. People who speak of outcomes and assessments also tend to use the phrase "value added."

As international culture and commerce become increasingly reliant on visual communications, visual literacy has developed into an essential skill for 21st-century college graduates. With advancements in technology and the digitizing of information, digital literacy has also grown in importance. Digital visual literacy (DVL) is the ability to critically analyze digital visual materials, create effective visual communications, and make judgments and decisions using visual representations of thoughts and ideas. These skills, which actively engage our cognitive processing of visual images, have evolved from concepts at the intersection of a range of established disciplines.

The ELI 2008 Spring Focus Session, "Real-World and Technology Rich: Learning by Doing, Learning in Context," will be held March 18–19 in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The conference program will address these topics and more:

• What it means for students to “learn by doing” and “learn in context”
• The value of using authentic activities and information technologies to support student learning
• Projects that model best practices
• Assessment strategies tailored to these experiential learning environments

View a list of speakers and register by February 19 to save money with low, early-bird rates.

This posting is intended to establish a common tag for Connect entries related to the upcoming ELI 2008 Annual Meeting, Connecting and Reflecting: Preparing Learners for Life 2.0. The conference is scheduled for January 28-30, 2008, at the Hyatt Regency San Antonio-Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas.

When posting content from or related to the conference in Connect, please be sure to tag it with:

ELIAnnual08

This will ensure your content appears on the Connect page for the event and is available to the larger community sharing ideas and reflections related to the conference.

The pedagogical applications of online games, simulations, virtual worlds, and other immersive environments are discussed in the new full-length video from ELI, Immersive Learning Environments: New Paths to Interaction and Engagement. The video draws on the ELI 2007 Spring Focus Session on this topic and includes discussions by Gary R. Bertoline, Phillip D. Long, Constance Steinkeuhler, Richard Van Eck, and others.

A quick snapshot of Twitter, a microblogging and social networking site, is presented in 7 Things You Should Know About Twitter, a new EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) brief. It also highlights Twitter's potential value for teaching and learning.

The Internet and a variety of emerging communication, visualization, and simulation technologies now make it possible to offer students authentic learning experiences ranging from experimentation to real-world problem solving. Explore authentic learning, what it is, how technology can support it, what makes it effective, and why it is important in Authentic Learning for the 21st Century: An Overview, by Marilyn M. Lombardi, ELI scholar-in-residence and director of the RENCI Center and senior IT strategist at Duke University. This piece is part of the ELI white paper series.

In this podcast of the presentation "Generation G and the 21st Century," Richard Van Eck, associate professor of instructional design and technology at the University of North Dakota, discusses the theory behind the effectiveness of games in teaching and learning; what the past can teach us about if, how, and when to implement digital game-based learning; and what this will mean for colleges and universities.

This was presented as a general session at Immersive Learning Environments: New Paths to Interaction and Engagement, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's Spring 2007 Focus Session, held at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation in Raleigh, North Carolina, March 27-28, 2007. Additional resources from the event, including session recordings and audio interviews, video, presentation materials, and photos, also are available online.

I interviewed Chris Dede, the Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, on some of the ideas behind his upcoming keynote address at the 2007 ELI Annual Meeting. Dede will conduct the general session scheduled for 8:00-9:30 AM on Tuesday, January 23; his topic will be "Emerging Educational Technologies and Neomillennial Learning Styles."

In this discussion, Dede explains the concept and key characteristics of "neomillennials." He also highlights the transformative effect of emerging immersive learning environments on higher education pedagogy and discusses the importance of faculty development in relation to these developments. Finally, he briefly touches on the National Science Foundation's cyberinfrastructure initiative as a significant topic he won't be able to cover in depth in Atlanta. However, he cites the November 2006 ELI Web Seminar he conducted on the cyberinfrastructure initiative as a resource for those interested in learning more about it.

For ELI's upcoming fall focus session on the role of assessment in supporting teaching and learning with technology, I interviewed Dr. Marilee Bresciani, Associate Professor of Postsecondary Education Leadership at San Diego State University.

In the interview, Dr. Bresciani defines outcomes-based assessment and shares her views on its application to teaching and learning with technology. Dr. Bresciani also discusses the keys for designing and implementing outcomes-based assessment for a given institution.

If you're interested in learning more about outcomes-based assessment, please see Dr. Bresciani's ELI Web Symposium presentation, How Do You Know What Your Students Are Learning?

Look for the proceedings from the ELI 2006 Fall Focus Session, Supporting Learning with Technology: Assessment's Role, via the focus session Web site. The proceedings should be available by the end of September.