ELI Web Seminars

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.

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.

One of the most powerful features of technology-enhanced learning environments is that they enable us to embed ongoing formative assessment and feedback into instructional activities. This Web seminar will demonstrate how two projects, the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University and ASSISTments, a Carnegie Mellon and Worcester Polytechnic Institute collaboration, use this feature to create dynamic, flexible, and responsive learning environments that foster robust learning.

In responding to internal and external pressures for accountability in higher education, especially in the areas of improved learning outcomes and student success, IT leaders may soon become critical partners with academic and student affairs. IT can contribute to this call for accountability through academic analytics, which is emerging as a new tool for a new era. This session will explore the emerging field of academic analytics and its potential impact on the institution and IT units. John Campbell will share the potential of analytics, explore the role of IT in analytics projects, highlight some early projects, and close with some considerations for building an analytics project on campus and potential policy concerns. The session will be based on an article [PDF 601 KB] published in the July/August 2007 EDUCAUSE Review by John Campbell, Peter DeBlois, and Diana Oblinger.

Web 2.0 projects have rapidly expanded into a world of social media. From blogs to podcasts, millions of people have published and shared a growing amount of digital content. At the same time virtual worlds have grown in popularity, from massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft to metaverse projects like Second Life. How do these two movements apply to higher education? Where do Web 2.0 and the metaverse connect? What trends are emerging for the near future?