EDUCAUSE | Teaching and Learning

Oblinger and Lombardi Contribute Chapter to New MIT Book on Openness

cluckett — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:02:11 -0500

EDUCAUSE President Diana Oblinger and Marilyn Lombardi, Director, Duke University’s Renaissance Computing Institute Center, contributed a chapter, "Common Knowledge: Openness in Higher Education," to a new book published by The MIT Press. Read the free, publicly accessible e-book, Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge.

ELI Launches Top Teaching and Learning Challenges Survey

pkurkowski — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:50:44 -0500

Assessment. Learning space design. Changing student and faculty practice. When polled, focus groups within the EDUCAUSE teaching and learning community identified their top “challenges” in teaching and learning with IT. But how does your list compare? What big issues dominate your campus conversations and water cooler debates? What challenges would you add?

This fall, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative is asking members to "weigh in" with their biggest challenges through a community survey, open through October. This brainstorming survey kicks off the EDUCAUSE Top Teaching and Learning Challenges project, a new community effort to both surface issues and to aggregate resources that can help to address them. Through online brainstorming, face-to-face sessions at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, and an EDUCAUSE-wide community vote, participants will identify the top-five issues in teaching and learning with technology. With the list in hand, the community will begin building content around each challenge, creating dynamic resource pages in wikis within EDUCAUSE Connect, and through collaborative working groups on the Challenges Ning Network. Adding to the readings and resources, community members will also be asked to contribute new content by drafting case study "community solutions" or creating podcasts and videos to illustrate solutions from their own campuses.

Help set the agenda and collaborate with colleagues around real solutions and innovative directions. Visit the project home page for more details.

Putting What Works to Better Use

ckeller — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:09:56 -0500

Colleges have proven techniques to improve student learning, but too few students — especially from at-risk populations — have access to them, study finds.

Understanding Students Who Were ‘Born Digital’

ckeller — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:01:29 -0500

Authors of a new book from the Berkman Center at Harvard talk about technology in the classroom, digital literacy and changes in the library.

Education Unbound 08

catherine — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:11:05 -0500

I'm looking forward to attending this year's Education Unbound event, organised by digital agency Online Creative Communications. I'll be joining Futurelab learning researcher Dan Sutch, teacher and web 2.0 advocate David Noble, and co-founder of the "School of Everything", Andy Gibson, on the speakers' panel for the evening event. Channel 4's Matt Locke will be ~~cat-herding~~, ahem, moderating what I'm sure will be a very lively discussion on all things related to learning and social media. Last year's event, which focused partly on the impact of social media on educational publishing, was reportedly thought-provoking - see previous participant Ewan McIntosh's lucid dissection of the 2007 event.

I'm expecting the discussion this year to highlight social media's role in informal learning contexts, including recent "open teaching" initiatives, which have obviously generated a lot of media interest and debate (the recent Chronicle article representing what was, from my perspective, a somewhat underwhelming and thin introduction to some of the issues). Issues around microblogging services and the emergence of what danah boyd (and others) have called "crowd effects" will doubtless also get an airing. I'm hoping that there will be space for discussion of mobile and pervasive devices, as well as experiential learning.

Paper accepted for Ascilite 2008

catherine — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:58:42 -0500

Today I was pleased to learn the paper written by my former CARET colleague Matt Riddle and myself has been accepted for the Ascilite 2008 conference this December in Melbourne, Australia. Our paper looks at students' ICT use in relation to their use of space; we have been doing a lot of work with maps!

I'm also looking forward to finding out more about Matt's role in an exciting new project on Spaces for Knowledge Generation, involving a partnership between La Trobe University as lead institution, Charles Sturt University, Apple Inc and Kneeler Design Architects. In January 2009, Matt and colleagues will be making a study tour to the US and UK to visit partners and institutions with key interests in learning space design.

E07 Podcast: Stanford Online: Evolution of Stanford University's Online Learning Platform

gbayne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:34:13 -0500

This thirty-nine minute podcast features a presentation from the 2007 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. The session, "Stanford Online: Evolution of Stanford University's Online Learning Platform," concerns Stanford University's next-generation course delivery interface, which features dramatically enhanced video assets combined with an innovative bookmarking tool. This tool enables the creation of personal notated bookmarks synchronized with streaming media content, innovative one-click navigation, sharing functionality for collaborative learning, and direct dialog with teaching staff.

Session presenters include:

Michael Rouan, Director, Stanford Online, Stanford University
Hoop Somuah, Software Design Engineer, Microsoft Corporation
Session convener: Elizabeth A. Unger, Vice Provost & Dean Emeritus, Kansas State University

I’ll Take My Lecture to Go, Please

ckeller — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:36:30 -0500

Comprehensive study finds that students overwhelmingly prefer having their lectures available online, either for remote access or for later viewing.

E07 Podcast: Teaching & Learning Experiences in a User-Created Virtual World

gbayne — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:37:25 -0500

This forty-three minute podcast, we feature a panel discussion from the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference. The panel, "Teaching & Learning Experiences in a User-Created Virtual World,"shares their experiences with teaching in Second Life. Using the interaction combinations integration model they developed as a framework, the panel describes the projects, outcomes, and gives some recommendations.

The panel includes:

David M. Antonacci, Director of Teaching & Learning Technologies, The University of Kansas Medical Center
Stephanie Gerald, Educational Technologist, The University of Kansas Medical Center
Randolph Hollingsworth, Assistant Provost for Integrated Academic Services, University of Kentucky
Edward Lamoureux, Associate Professor, Multimedia Program and Department of Communication, Bradley University
Nicholas S. Noakes, Director, Center for Enhanced Learning and Teaching, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
David Thomas, Lecturer, School of Architecture and Planning, University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center
Session convener: Mary Jane Clerkin, Coordinator of Online Faculty Support, Berkeley College

E07 Podcast: Technological Impact: Interactive Digital Centers as Digital Content Providers

gbayne — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:50:39 -0500

This forty-eight minute podcast features a session from the 2007 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. The session, "Technological Impact: Interactive Digital Centers as Digital Content Providers," features Jamie Justice, Director of Visualization and Technology Education at Kentucky Community & Technical College System. Powerpoint slides are also available for this session.

The Kentucky Community and Technical College system has implemented an Interactive Digital Center focused on digital content creation, visualization systems integration, simulation, and digital learning. This session provides an overview of how the IDC is also focused on application development, training, integration, and deployment of visualization technologies.