EDUCAUSE Review Articles and Virtual Worlds

Focusing on “imagining the future,” the EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee looked at seven technologies and trends of 2007: the Web, Google Apps, Web conferencing, m-learning, 3D printing, virtualization, and information lifecycle management and physical storage technologies for digital.

Given the demands of teaching, service, and research, faculty are today expected to embrace learning technologies along with everything else, challenging the institution to help them make sense of what works and how to work it.

With directed effort, some ingenuity, and a future-focused vision, colleges and universities should be able to identify and leverage existing technologies with which to build aspects of "future" campus learning spaces—today.

Four factors of the Internet—technology, the market, the law, and social norms—offer a means to analyze the legal, policy, and educational considerations associated with the use of social networking technologies by today's college and university students.

From Diana G. Oblinger, ed., Learning Spaces
As we build the classrooms of the future that facilitate usability, engagement, collaboration, and learning, we would do well to remember what it was about learning environments that enchanted us and commit ourselves to preserving, restoring, and creating those experiences for our own students.

To learn more about videogames in academe, the author spoke with five leading-edge thinkers in the field: James Paul Gee, J. C. Herz, Randy Hinrichs, Marc Prensky, and Ben Sawyer.