Students and 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.

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.

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.

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.

Digital field assignments combine active-learning strategies with digital technologies to engage today's learners in team-based assignments in which students apply classroom concepts as they research real-world problems. This session will define the concept of digital field assignments, present case studies, and share best practices.

The Open Source Portfolio (OSP), which began as a student-centered tool promoting student learning and providing opportunities for career development and reflection, also offers features that make it an essential tool for value-added assessment, program improvement, and accreditation. This session will offer perspectives from several campuses concerning these OSP applications.

This session will report on the Digital Enhanced Learning Initiative (DELI), which explores how student-centered technologies can enhance students' academic experiences. Students in five freshman seminars received an iPod or a digital camera to complete course work. Students keep the technology in exchange for sharing information on their use during their remaining four years at the college.

Join this panel that continues the discussion addressed in a 2006 EDUCAUSE Quarterly article by McDonald and Thomas on the disconnects between library culture and millennial generation values. Panelists will cover three broad areas of demographics, design, and social outreach as related to the needs of the millennial library researcher.

Routine in business, data mining has unrealized potential in education. Sophisticated educational media enable the collection of rich data streams about individual learners. Analyzing these data streams could yield formative, diagnostic information about student performance (including real-time feedback to teachers) and research findings about student behavior and learning. Session presenters will share their work exploring the educational potentials of data mining.

"With federal backing, 3 higher ed groups will undertake project to develop multiple ways of measuring student learning — answering call for accountability, but with colleges in the driver’s seat."