Recent Report from Educause on Students and Their Expectations for IT

Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Students' 'Evolving' Use of Technology

This article provides a very interesting overview of some observations found in an annual survey sponsored by Educause (The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2007) about how the current college student's expectations of IT enhanced learning is "evolving".

A Concern:

While the "sage on the stage" style of teaching has not been the preferred model for a while now, it is going to be even less effective with the "digital natives" crowd.

A Prediction:

Google Docs and Wiki spaces are going to be increasingly important components of the "learning" toolbox. The price is right for one thing (free) and faculty will increasingly want to be independent of the "controls" placed on them by IT management at our higher ed institutions.

A Recommendation:

IT management teams should take a hard look at what they're doing to support the academic mission. The availability of specific services by outside vendors has changed dramatically. A few years ago it was important for IT teams to provide an email infrastructure to support the academic mission, but now with both Google and Microsoft providing email services it no longer seems prudent. Microsoft's Version Google's Version

Tags: Classroom, Higher Education, Teaching, Email

Mind Mapping Meets Wikipedia

As a strong advocate for any tool that aids the learning process, I have to give a PG rating (Pretty Great) to http://www.wikimindmap.org. So, let's say for instance that we want to continue our learning on RSS news feeds.

1. Visit the site http://www.wikimindmap.org
2. Set the appropriate language, which if you're reading this you'll probably want to set it to en.wikipedia.org.
3. Enter a topic like RSS

or go directly to the results by clicking below: http://www.wikimindmap.org/viewmap.php?wiki=en.wikipedia.org&topic=RSS

Tags: Classroom, Higher Education, Learning, Teaching, Mind Mapping, RSS, Web 2.0

Can Brittanica Do This?

New Tool Mines Wikipedia Truthfulness Annotated

I happen to really like wikipedia--especially as I'm trying to keep up with the latest "tech" jargon. In the world of academia, however, it has its detractors. And understandably so--mature and wise scholars sometimes can be tricked by the accuracy of an entry, so it is no wonder that young students may get tripped up. A software tool like the one in this article could really help Wikipedia be a more trusted tool in the classroom. As the article states it's not fool-proof, but the reality is that our students, I hope, will be applying critical thinking skills to anything they read.

A list of items that I highlighted from the article--see link at the top of this entry for the article in its entirety (including the full annotated version).

• Because anyone can edit Wikipedia, the Web encyclopedia's reliability varies wildly.
• Now a computer science professor hopes to give users a better baloney detector: software that flags questionable lines in Wikipedia entries.
• he software will color text some gradation of orange if there is reason to doubt its content. The deeper the orange, the more likely it is malarkey.
• by analyzing the reputations of the contributors responsible for each line.
• In general, the less tinkering your work on Wikipedia engenders, the more trustworthy you are deemed to be.
• For example, in an extensive entry on the old Commodore 64 computers - http://tinyurl.com/2dbggk - the Santa Cruz software tags just three lines, each an unfootnoted statement of purported fact.

Tags: Digital World, Higher Education, Learning, Teaching, Web 2.0

Google Books Update

Your Own Google Books Library, and More Annotated

This update is provided by Philipp Lennsen who writes for one of my favorite blogs (Blogoscoped). I continue to be drawn to things that could change the classroom and I really think Google's initiative with Google Books has the potential to be an amazing teaching resource. A list of items that I highlighted from the article--see link at the top of this entry for the article in its entirety (including the full annotated version). your library is RSS-ified for others to subscribe to, and you can export it using another custom XML format listing title, author, ISBN and such. Importing books is possible as well by providing a list of ISBNs.

Google's embed dialog also allows you to directly blog something with Blogger, or add it to Google Notebook.

The Google Books project, formerly called Google Print (project name "Ocean"), continues to evolve aiming to become "the" book search center with an abundance of research options and data mining features, like maps integration, or the new popular passages.

Right now the biggest obstacle for users I see are the often confusing separations between public domain books, partner books and library books.

And why shouldn't I be allowed to clip fair use passages from copyrighted books, for instance?

In related news, the New York Times reports that both Amazon and Google will be entering the ebook market this year.

Tags: Classroom, Digital World, Learning, Teaching, Higher Education, Ebooks

Fair Use--An Important Topic for Higher Education

This is a fascinating topic. Especially as the younger generation seems to thrive on taking bits and pieces of various media (i.e. parts of a song)and re-mixing it into something for public consumption. Dan Tapscot and Anthony D. Williams covered this topic in their book entitled Wikinomics ("Prosumer" chapter, if I remember correctly). It seems that times are changing--Philipp Lenssen from "Blogoscoped" notes that Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are backing a Defend Fair Use Initiative This is an amazing development! Microsoft thrives on a proprietary software, yet the latest version of the Office Suite (2007) is actually XML content and a zip file. In other words, the proprietary file format that was used in Office 2003 is now very "open" in Office 2007. What is this world coming to--the more I know the more confused I get.

CCIA - Defend Fair Use

Tags: Classroom, Higher Education, Learning, Teaching, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Books

The Future Classroom

Wiki becomes textbook in Boston College classroom Annotated

Anyone in higher education should take note of the following article. It makes me think of two questions that need to be answered as the needs and services the future student will expect from our higher education institutions continues to change:

1. Will open source software, like the wiki and Google Docs, replace the proprietary software of companies like "Blackboard" and "Microsoft Office" respectively? 2. Will retention of the higher education student be negatively impacted by the lack of the interactive web based tools like those cited in this article? A list of items that I highlighted from the article--see link at the top of this entry for the article in its entirety. At many colleges and universities, wikis are used mostly as a supplement to primary teaching tools like textbooks and labs, while other Web 2.0 technologies -- such as social networking sites like Facebook -- have become a staple of student life.

In one Boston College professor's classroom, however, wikis have become a primary learning tool, replacing textbooks and allowing improved collaboration among students.

Gerald Kane, assistant professor of information systems at the Chestnut Hill, Mass., school, has been using a wiki from SocialText Inc. as the primary teaching tool in his classroom since October, relying on the technology to integrate content from other Web 2.0 technologies like social book-making tools, RSS systems, and Google for his "Computers in Management" courses.

Some recent research surveys have found that some companies are investing in wikis, but the technology is used less heavily than other Web 2.0 tools like RSS feeds and social networks.

The survey concluded that companies are investing more heavily in Web services, RSS, podcasts, social networking and peer-to-peer networking

A Chief Enrollment Officer that Sleeps at Night—A Website the Works (Abstract)

Almost 20 years ago the recruitment process had some key differences from today's environment.

• It used to be that the admissions counselor was the expert-- the "go to" person for a prospective student and their parents to get the answers on anything related to enrollment and available programs.
• It used to be that a prospect had one telephone number and people still answered their landline phone.
• It used to be that a business letter in a #10 envelope was somewhat effective at sending a message to prospects.
• It used to be that you could "pull" students to your institution without a strategic and aggressive marketing effort.
• It used to be that an admissions counselor could accomplish most administrative tasks with the use of a relational database and some available pre-written reports.

The student prospect has so many communication channels available to them. And, because of that, one would expect that it is easier to contact them--but, in fact, that doesn't seem to be the case.

It seems that the only medium that provides a common platform for communicating with prospects and their parents is the "web". There is plenty to keep an enrollment person "awake at night", but some of them might be "how many prospects come to our website but leave without finding the information they needed?"; What if we (the higher education institution) indeed had what they needed, but they just didn't find it?; What if they were unhappy with the way things were organized, left unhappy, but never told you?

So how does an enrollment manager overcome these challenges? How do you "push" the message to your constituents and measure the effectiveness of that message? How do you make sure that pertinent information is getting to the people who need it? How do you connect these interested parties with the appropriate admissions counselor for efficient follow-up?

So the market has changed and Higher Ed. Institutions can't really sit around and wait for students to come through the door. Judson doesn't have all the answers, and in fact we're very open about the fact that we're still learning and plan to keep learning. The following is a list of features we've added to our website in order to meet the changing needs of our various constituents:

• "Content Management System"--As the name connotes, this type of database is charged with the task of managing "content" or "blocks of content". This content can be re-used in several areas of the website without creating multiple copies of the same information.
• Really Simple Syndication (RSS) news feeds, which will allow Judson to "push" the appropriate content to the right audiences. Constituents can choose to "subscribe" to certain channels of information.
• A "taxonomy", which is a structured hierarchy for storing all of the types of content that are necessary for a higher education institution. This is similar to a "folksonomy" but rather than the users deciding what descriptive tags are added to the content, it is already pre-determined.

Taxonomy Project--Key Questions to be Answered

Developing and Creatively Leveraging Hierarchical Metadata and Taxonomy - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design Annotated

Okay--I've already blogged about mind-mapping and its relationship to the "concept mapping" note taking scheme that I was introduced to in my college Biology class. But, I was reminded by the article above that it was Biologists who started this whole taxonomy mess--see quote below:

Historically used by biologists to classify plants or animals according to a set of natural relationships, in content management and information architecture, we tend to leverage taxonomies as a tool for organizing content.

One of my quests during sabbatical is to define a taxonomy that lets Judson University manage content better. My initial motives were driven by the need to push content to our website in a way that makes sense to our various constituents--students, prospects, alumni etc., but the truth is that this taxonomy or "information architecture plan" or "controlled vocabulary" has broader uses than just the website.

My key questions are as follows:

Can the everyday work accomplished by University employees be leveraged to create the content for the website? In other words, can the work they're already doing (no retraining necessary) be used to create "up to date" and accurate content for our various audiences?

Can a system be created for content creation that allows the "experts" be in charge of particular areas of content? For example, can the business office function of the university be in charge of the content for all tuition cost questions with all of the departments in the University linking to that content for the accurate, concise and unified answer?

Can a system of organization (taxonomy) be designed in such a way that it actually fosters relationships with our key constituents? For instance, can alumni testimonials harvested through the alumni community portion of the website be re-purposed to the departments they graduated from to potentially sell current prospects on the reason they should consider attending Judson?