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

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

Working the Web Article from "University Business" April 2007 (author: Chelan David)

Working The Web Annotated

I enjoyed this article that was recently posted on the "University Business" Magazine website, authored by Chelan David. You may click the link above to see the entire article, or visit the "annotated" link above that I annotated through Diigo (http://www.diigo.com/). The highlighted quotes, that you could see by visiting the "annotated" link above are extracted for you below:

• The shift toward user-generated content is having a major impact on education
• Educators are taking advantage of photo and video sharing services, podcasting, wikis, blogs, and other social software to instruct learners through the latest in internet technologies
• Key aspects of the movement include web architecture that encourages user contributions, the continuous updates of software and data, and the freedom to share and edit content
• Think of social bookmarking as version 2.0 of the personal bookmarks on your browser
• In contrast to the bookmarks on your computer, social bookmarking sites are available to you from any computer. Also, you can: add tags (free-text keywords) to your posts; see what others are posting and what tags they're using; and sort items of interest by tag, project, or user

Web 2.0 in the Classroom

I just finished teaching a computer ethics course at Judson University--okay, it's still Judson College now, but they will be changing to University this Fall (http://www.judsoncollege.edu/). I used a web 2.0 tool called diigo (http://www.diigo.com/). Diigo is an acronym for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff".

It may be that you've heard of del.icio.us which is a very popular social bookmarking tool. Diigo is a social bookmarking tool plus annotation tool. It allows you to read an article, bookmark it, and within the article, make annotations like "highlighting" and "sticky note comments". This makes it an awesome research tool.

In the past I have had students bring articles to class that pertain to the assigned chapters, but this time I made this an entirely digital activity. The students were to find online articles, book mark, annotate, and share them with the group forum that I set up for them. We then, with the group forum on the projector screen, would have each student talk us through their article.

While this tool is still in "beta" the student assessment survey that was taken at the end of the last class seemed to indicate that this activity was well received.

Tags: Bookmarking, Classroom, Learning, Teaching, TabletPC, Web 2.0, Organize