Contributed by EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and Net Generation Learner

Cosponsored by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), EDUCAUSE, and the University of Central Florida (UCF), the Students, Technology and Learning: Strategies for Success Conference (formerly the Key to Competitiveness) provides AASCU institutions with an opportunity to learn more about the next generation of students—a group with much greater expectations for the use of technology in higher education than previous generations. The event allows teams of presidents and senior institutional leaders to explore new ways of using technology to meet student expectations and more effectively serve the next generation learner.

The Net Generation Workshop Guide is a collection of simple activities and suggested readings on the Net Generation. It is divided into easily customized modules that can be used as stand-alone activities lasting a couple of hours or all together for a multi-day event. They have been designed for faculty development, staff retreats, or similar programs.

Assessment is an integral component of any successful teaching effort. Research has shown that students engage with subject matter based in part on their expectations about how their achievement will be evaluated. Educators who strive to bring authentic learning experiences to their students must devise appropriate and meaningful measures to assess student learning and mastery of concepts at hand. Although some barriers must be overcome, numerous examples point to the opportunities available for effective assessment of authentic learning initiatives. These approaches to assessment are vital to ensuring that models of teaching and learning with technology see their full potential.

Engineering Informatics for Bio-Inspired Robots is an NSF-funded project trying to break down barriers to collaboration between engineering and computer science departments. Faculty members participating in the project are teaching the next generation of engineers and computer scientists to produce intelligent design by reaching across disciplines. The goal is to ensure that students are better prepared to tackle the multidisciplinary demands of the engineering and computing industries. As part of the project, participating institutions are leveraging cyberinfrastructure to share expertise, store research results, and advocate for multidisciplinary instruction, demonstrating the power of inter-institutional cooperation for teaching and learning.

nanoHUB is an online portal for nanotechnology researchers, instructors, and students created by Purdue University and the National Science Foundation. It uses cyberinfrastructure to provide access to scientific tools for research, demonstration, and collaboration, as well as instructional materials. Users can run experiments, review research, or download lectures. nanoHUB is a virtual toolkit as well as a community where students and faculty contribute to the science of nanotechnology.

Authentic learning aligns well with the needs of today's participatory learners. The challenge is to channel their online and collaborative abilities and interests into academic pursuits, helping them develop the higher-order thinking skills they may not acquire on their own. This second paper in the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's authentic learning series presents case studies on how institutions have used technology to foster authentic learning and thus better meet learners' needs.

The Mixed Apparatus for Radar Investigation of Atmospheric Cosmic-Rays of High Ionization (MARIACHI) project is setting a new standard for authentic learning—enabling students to learn by doing. Under the direction of scientists, students are building, monitoring, and analyzing data from devices that detect ultra high-energy cosmic rays in the atmosphere. They are also learning how to connect those devices to a larger cyberinfrastructure so they and the scientific community can learn more about these highly charged energy particles.

Learning-by-doing is generally considered the most effective way to learn. 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. This white paper explores what constitutes authentic learning, how technology supports it, what makes it effective, and why it is important.

Faculty and students are recognizing blogging's learning potential, including the chance to practice writing, reflect on others' thinking, and respond to critical analyses of one's own work. In this paper, a graduate student explores the campus "blogosphere" to discover who is blogging and what they are posting, as well as how faculty are using blogs in their courses and the results they are seeing.

The Web—and how we interact with it—has become part of our culture. The Internet is now the information universe, and we expect instant access. Content is created and co-created by amateurs as well as experts. More than ever, we choose what, when, and where to use information. What it means to be "net savvy" is changing because the nature of information itself has changed.