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

Cooperation and Collaboration in Higher Education

Google Code - Updates: UW and Google: Teaching in Parallel Annotated

Big Business (Google) collaborates with Higher Education (University of Washington) to teach students about Grid Computing. And that's not all, UW invites other universities to get in on the action. This is a great story with awesome potential.

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).

Earlier this year, the University of Washington partnered with Google to develop and implement a course to teach large-scale distributed computing based on MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS).

The goal of developing the course was to expose students to the methods needed to address the problems associated with hundreds (or thousands) of computers processing huge datasets ranging into terabytes

Tags: Learning, Higher Education, Open Source, Teaching, Distributed Computing, Google