Learning

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 days of walled-off learning, where students are separated into grades, disciplines and physical locations, are giving way to programs in which students are encouraged to look beyond lecture halls, labs, and textbooks. Technology offers opportunities to bring together people, tools, and data in a global commons . Creating a global commons requires more than removing barriers posed by subject matter, geography, economics, or age. It requires a new set of models that may challenge many of our historic assumptions about authority and education. This presentation explores principles and examples that hint at a future global commons."

Many college students today are comfortable communicating through digital media. Simultaneously, faculty members are increasingly cognizant of the pedagogical benefits of digital technologies. This presentation will explore whether Apple's iTunes U can provide an effective way for faculty and students to produce, store, access, and distribute digital content. We will describe how faculty from the music, foreign languages, and economics departments collaborated with the Educational Technology Center to pilot iTunesU. Can this "cool" technology meet our institution's digital needs, or will this content-hungry application turn us into Looney Tunes U?

This presentation will discuss the results of a yearlong study on using social networking technology to facilitate collaborative research in undergraduate-level English courses. Students collaboratively constructed wikis that served as research guides and incorporated a wide range of primary and secondary source material. The project brought about many successes and raised issues about what we value in student writing and research, as well as what we hope to gain from employing these new and ever-changing technologies in humanities courses.

Mark Werner reviews Audience Response Systems in Higher Education: Applications and Cases, written by David A. Banks.

A new studio classroom inspired excitement and motivated productive feedback from early faculty and student users.

Diana Oblinger explores the 'net generation' who can seamlessly move between their real and digital lives. Their behaviours, preferences and expectations may be very different from those of their teachers. Diana examines the characteristics of these learners, the possibilities offered by new technologies and the skills that an education system needs to provide for the 21st century. She also argues that we need to adapt to this rapidly evolving context and goes on to explore the implications for learning space design, assessment and learning and teaching.

This session will present the planning, use, and assessment of our first flexible technology-enhanced classroom or learning "studio"—an immediately useful yet also provocative and experimental space. We will show how the completed space itself challenged our faculty and students to redefine what learning at UMSL could mean.