Students and Teaching and Learning

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.

Students are increasingly demanding and expecting more from e-learning provision. Based on data collected over five years, this session will explore trends in student e-learning expectations at a U.K. university, outlining the main themes that emerged from the study and how these have been used to develop policy and practice.

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.

Since 2003, the Speak Up National Research Project has collected authentic feedback about technology and education from over 1.1 million K–12 students. Learn about the expectations of today's digital learners for 21st-century learning environments, and how you can be prepared to address the technology needs of your future students.

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?

As information literacy is incorporated into accreditation standards, the teaching of these skills is becoming a broader campus concern. In this session, we will present the World War II Poster Project, a unit developed collaboratively by faculty and members of the library/IT staff to address these skills.

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

The author has found that her military experience has proven to be good training for teaching ill prepared students.