Web Seminars Contributed by EDUCAUSE, ELI Web Seminars, and Presentations/Speeches

Although authentic tasks can be incorporated more easily in web-based learning environments as course management systems have become more flexible, many higher education instructors remain uncertain about how to design engaging authentic learning environments. With advances in learning theory and technology, there is increased potential for authentic tasks to be used as the primary underlying pedagogy for supporting learning in face-to-face, blended, and totally online courses. These tasks can range from relatively simple life examples that serve as vehicles for practicing specific skills to a more radical approach of building a whole course around a compelling authentic task.

In this seminar, Reeves will describe the theory, research, and development underlying authentic tasks in web-based learning environments as well as practical design guidelines for implementing this innovative approach.

In this web seminar, Malcolm Brown, will explore the concept of innovation and critical role that innovation plays in teaching and learning effectiveness.

More so than any other aspect of higher education, Brown says, learning continues to undergo rapid and far-reaching changes. This is due to a confluence of factors, such as the powerful emergence of the social web, mobile technologies that are more powerful and affordable, changes in the expectations of our students and younger faculty, and the impact of the insights of constructivist learning theory. These factors influence all of our learning designs, including learning practices, learning applications, and certainly learning spaces. In short, it seems to be a domain calling for almost constant innovation. The need to think creatively and to innovate will remain a fundamental part of our work to support higher education learning for some time to come.

In this session, we will look into the concept of innovation. Using some recent publications on this topic, we will explore what innovation is and is not. We‘ll explore what helps innovation and makes it constructive, and what hinders it and renders it ineffective. The goal of this session will be to gain some insight into our own practices and to come away with ideas as to how we can improve those practices.

Today’s youth are visually stimulated, but hardly literate, in engaging in a vocabulary of design and the language of images. To educate and engage this new breed of learners, institutions of higher education are revisiting and revising the basic tenets of a general education by asking, What does it mean to be literate in today’s visually saturated society?

Please Note: Due to technical difficulties, the audio archive begins while the session is in progress

Community-generated media is the real-world equivalent of “user-generated content” online. As our major media begin to roll out into our streets via wireless networks, handheld devices, and public displays, an exciting opportunity arises for the personal and social potential of these media to foster a "Renaissance 2.0" within our cities and community spaces. Ambient urban media still follows a broadcast paradigm (like TV), whereas the primary dynamic of public space is social (like the Internet). Humanity's participative nature will make it possible for communities to collectively create vibrant, hyperlocal identities for themselves through media. Think of CGM as a “strange loop” where communities generate media that generate community.

Vogt will introduce the CGM program currently under way with the Mobile MUSE Network in Vancouver. The network has designed a mobile services platform to enable the staging of collective media experiences streamed between handheld devices and public displays. A pair of showcase projects explore "a tale of two cities"—the remarkably parallel aspirations of the Whistler ski resort and Vancouver's downtown eastside, each seeking to tell its own story with mobile media.

Good questions, Swan argues, specify not just outcomes but also inputs and, most importantly, learning processes. In this seminar, she will review the major issues and processes to consider in assessing the impact of technology on student learning. In particular, she will highlight the importance of carefully assessing teaching and learning inputs and processes in addition to learning outcomes in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of where and how the use of technology supports learning.

As educators, Lovett says, we tend to focus on teaching students "content," but we also want to help students develop as learners. Metacognition—thinking about one’s own thinking and reflecting on one’s own learning—is essential to achieving both goals, and yet instructors often feel they lack time or expertise to teach their students metacognitive skills. This presentation offers a second opportunity to hear Lovett’s popular featured session from the 2008 ELI Annual Meeting.

AR experiences combine virtual overlays of information onto real-world locations. These interactive experiences equip users with location sensing devices (for example, Windows Mobile PDAs with GPS), providing players with location-specific data, narrative, and rich media. As players move around a real-world location, their devices allow them to interview virtual game characters, collect virtual data, and consider the interrelationships between their real-world location and the virtual information provided.

In this seminar, Perry will provide an overview of recent work in AR by the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program (MIT STEP), which has been conducting research on using AR simulations for educational purposes with the aim of better understanding how these experiences might offer new learning opportunities. AR games have the potential not only to engage players with specific content but also to provide opportunities to develop 21st-century skills such as collaboration, communication, and critical thinking. The MIT STEP lab is also developing AR authoring toolkits that will allow AR game designers to create their own location-based games.

Over the past decade, colleges and universities have increasingly turned to the web to increase student access, expand course offerings, and reach out to adult learners through online courses. The growth of distance and online education has been mirrored by a similar explosion in social software tools such as Facebook, Second Life, blogs, wikis, Flickr, and a host of Web 2.0 competitors that offer new ways for us to learn with and from each other. As our Web 2.0 toolbox grows, so do faculty and administrator concerns about control, privacy, assessment, and the effectiveness of these tools in the classroom.

In this seminar, Anderson will highlight an educational model for distance and online learning that leverages social software to help both learners and educators determine the most effective tool and granularity of application for their learning needs. He will also demonstrate a number of current and emerging tools and share practices that promise to help us learn from and with each other with an emphasis on social learning that includes groups, networks, and the collective.

Once relegated to the fringes of the games industry, virtual worlds such as Second Life are now viewed as a promising instructional platform. College instructors use this emerging technology to teach courses on topics ranging from architecture and anthropology to history, literature and computer programming, and a growing number of Fortune 500 companies conduct employee training in virtual worlds. In 2007 alone, educational institutions were responsible for the creation of more than 1,200 islands in Second Life.

While many educators are excited about the potential of virtual worlds, others are deeply wary. Some fear that virtual worlds are a faddish technology that actually degrades student learning. In this presentation, Professor Aaron Delwiche of Trinity University suggests that there are grounds for both enthusiasm and skepticism. Virtual worlds are certainly not an educational panacea, and they present many challenges for students, instructors, and administrators. When coupled with thoughtful strategies grounded in situated learning theory, however, these emerging technologies can be very powerful educational tools.

Since the 1990s, we’ve been putting our Web courses in boxes, mastering enterprise course management systems, and striving for single sign-on seamless integration between all Web-enabled business and academic environments in each of our colleges and universities. Sometime around the turn of the century, however, explosive innovation on the open Web began to turn a “read only” environment into a “read/write” environment. With the development of RSS as a syndication platform, the read/write environment began to support and foster a very powerful, loosely coupled information architecture across the World Wide Web. In 2004, a group led by Tim O’Reilly gave this phenomenon a name: Web 2.0.

In this seminar, Campbell will explore the concepts behind Web 2.0, some of the individual tools and services (Flickr, Facebook, Second Life, del.icio.us) that are commonly listed under this rubric, and the implications of this phenomenon for teaching and learning, particularly in higher education. He will also present several ways in which he and his colleagues have used Web 2.0 tools and services, both as teachers and in their own learning, and comment on the good, the bad, and the ugly results. If time permits, he will also speak to the relationship between Web 2.0 and the open source software movement. Finally, he’ll offer some thoughts on what Web 3.0 might look like, and why educators should care.