Students and Instructional Technologies

Educating our students is certainly our priority, but how can we connect learners to each other in a way that provides more opportunities for personal growth, networking, and connections? By taking advantage of virtual spaces like Facebook, Twitter, and Second Life, we give our students space to learn outside the classroom.

Educational technologists and librarians will follow up their well-received EDUCAUSE 2007 panel session on library disconnects to focus on millennial user expectations concerning learning management systems. Bringing together a diverse set of perspectives and outside-the-box thinkers, this session will feature panelist discussion interspersed with new media demonstrations and audience participation.

For several years, educational innovators have experimented with using virtual worlds such as Second Life to enhance student learning. Though many of these implementations seem successful, few have incorporated structured assessment. This panel brings together practitioners from four institutions that have conducted such assessments to discuss their results.

This session will be simulcast in Second Life.

Imagine a freshman college student in the year 2015. She has grown up in a world where learning is as accessible through technologies at home as it is in the classroom, and digital content is as real to her as paper, lab equipment, or textbooks. In high school, she and her classmates engaged in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing visualizations of real-time data from remote sensors. Away from the classroom, she has had seamless access to school materials and homework assignments using inexpensive mobile technologies. She continues to collaborate with her classmates in virtual environments that allow not only social interaction with each other but also rich connections with a wealth of supplementary content. Her teacher has tracked her progress over the course of a lesson plan and compared her performance across a lifelong digital portfolio, making note of areas that need additional attention through personalized assignments and alerting parents to specific concerns. What makes this possible is cyberlearning, the use of networked computing and communications technologies to support learning. Cyberlearning has the potential to transform education by enabling customized interaction with diverse learning materials on any topic, from anthropology to zoology. Todays students already enter the university with high expectations for the use of technology in their learning and for maintaining relationships with their high school classmates, wherever they may have scattered for college or career. The educational system must respond dynamically to prepare our population for the complex, evolving, global challenges of the 21st century. Advances in technology are poised to meet these educational demands. Cyberlearning offers new learning and educational approaches and the possibility of redistributing learning experiences over time and space, beyond the classroom and throughout a lifetime. This talk will present the report of the National Science Foundation Task Force on Cyberlearning and its implications for higher education.

Today's technology enables users to form and join communities of common interest to learn and share information. In opposition to the privileged learning spaces of higher education, social media encourage learners to seek out their own answers and construct knowledge as a community rather than as individuals. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and Second Life offer new learning spaces, but how do they fit into the learning expectations of institutions?

Surveying the university community taught us about the importance of the process as well as the survey results.

How would students answer the question, "What would your ideal education look like?" See for yourself in the student content showcase, produced in collaboration with Apple. Five Apple student representatives will informally respond to the question through short videos they have created, which they will present in the Rio Grande West Ballroom at various points in the program.

These "video poster sessions" will give you the chance to discuss with them their views on teaching and learning as well as the technical and creative processes behind their videos. This is a great opportunity to talk with students about their expectations for Learning 2.0 while learning some techniques and tips for creating your own videos.

In addition to conducting the showcase, these students will also capture and present their conference experience. Links to their videos, podcasts, blogs, etc., will be added to the ELI Web site as they become available, adding a student voice to our citizen journalism activity.

This presentation will examine an interdisciplinary podcasting project that put podcasting into the hands of students so they could examine their research from a new perspective and reinterpret course content in audio.

This is the February 2008 ECAR survey instrument used for the ECAR research study of student information technology use and skills in higher education.