Video Uses Student Voices to Explore New Directions in Education – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Michael Wesch, an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, began ‘The Visions of Students Tomorrow’ on January 18. It is a new video-collaboration project that he hopes will help generate a conversation about the ‘media-ated life’ of many students. He wants not only to gain insights into how students interact with their dense and ever-changing media environment, but also to tackle the question of whether instructors have kept pace with it.”
Month: January 2011
Technology Leaders Balk at Technical Guideline in Federal Grant Program – The Chronicle of Higher Education
Technology Leaders Balk at Technical Guideline in Federal Grant Program – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Some higher-education leaders say a little-noticed technical note in a new $2-billion federal grant program could make it difficult for colleges to use the money to build free online course materials.”
Digital Video Project Ideas
“What Font Should I Use?”: Five Principles for Choosing and Using Typefaces – Smashing Magazine
“What Font Should I Use?”: Five Principles for Choosing and Using Typefaces – Smashing Magazine: “Selecting the right typeface is a mixture of firm rules and loose intuition, and takes years of experience to develop a feeling for. Here are five guidelines for picking and using fonts that I’ve developed in the course of using and teaching typography.”
$2-Billion Federal Program Could Be ‘Windfall’ for Open Online Learning – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education
$2-Billion Federal Program Could Be ‘Windfall’ for Open Online Learning – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education: ” The four-year program, designed to expand job training at community colleges, signals a major endorsement of the movement to freely share learning materials on the Internet.”
Colleges Search for Their Place in the Booming Mobile Web – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education
Colleges Search for Their Place in the Booming Mobile Web – The Chronicle of Higher Education:
“Hand-held devices like smartphones and tablets are fast becoming the primary way many people use the Internet. Half of all college students used mobile gear to get on the Internet every day last year, compared with 10 percent of students in 2008, according to Educause, the educational-technology consortium.”
Between eclecticism and orthodoxy in instructional design – Educational Technology Research and Development, Online First™
SpringerLink – Educational Technology Research and Development, Online First™:
Stephen C. Yanchar and Bruce W. Gabbitas
“This paper presents the concept of critical flexibility as an alternative to eclecticism in instructional design. Eclecticism is often viewed as a persuasive alternative to theoretical orthodoxy (i.e., rigid use of a single perspective or process) due to the openness and flexibility it purports to offer. In contrast, the authors argue that eclecticism ignores or discourages critical reflection regarding background understanding (e.g., implicit assumptions and values) and perpetuates the lack of openness and flexibility commonly associated with orthodoxy. Critical flexibility, as an alternative to eclecticism, emphasizes an awareness of background understanding, but construes it as capable of being explicated, critically examined, adjusted in specific contexts, and refined or developed over time to facilitate increasingly flexible and effective design practices. The authors clarify the nature of critical flexibility as a general way of being involved in the design process, suggest how it helps overcome the traditional theory–practice split, and discuss several of its implications for scholarship and training.”
Laptop initiative: Impact on instructional technology integration and student learning
SpringerLink – Education and Information Technologies, Online First™:
By: Jared Keengwe, Gary Schnellert and Chris Mills
“The purpose of this study was to examine how 1:1 laptop initiative affected student learning at a selected rural Midwestern high school. A total of 105 high school students enrolled in 10th–12th grades during the 2008–2009 school year participated in the study. A survey instrument created by the Mitchell Institute was modified and used to collect data on student perceptions and faculty perceptions of the impact of 1:1 laptop computing on student learning and instructional integration of technology in education. Study findings suggest that integration of 1:1 laptop computing positively impacts student academic engagement and student learning. Therefore, there is need for teachers to implement appropriate computing practices to enhance student learning. Additionally, teachers need to collaborate with their students to learn and understand various instructional technology applications beyond basic Internet browsing and word processing.”
Why Some Elite Colleges Give Away Courses Online – Technology – The Chronicle
Why Some Elite Colleges Give Away Courses Online – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education: “This week a new book, Unlocking the Gates (Princeton University Press), takes stock of that movement by focusing on some of its most high-profile players and their online successes and failures.”
Technological diversity: an investigation of students’ technology use in everyday life and academic study – Learning, Media and Technology
Technological diversity: an investigation of students’ technology use in everyday life and academic study – Learning, Media and Technology: “Generational generalisations regarding how students interact with technology have been used in recent times to prompt calls for radical changes to the delivery of teaching in higher education. This article reports on a study aimed to investigate first-year students’ technology access and usage in two contexts of use: everyday life and academic study. A survey was delivered to first-year students across seven faculties of an Australian university during the second semester of the 2008 academic year. A total of 470 respondents met the criteria for this study. The findings suggest a wide diversity of usage of technologies with the usage rates of technology in academic study being generally lower than those in everyday life. These findings indicated that generational generalisations are not useful in informing the design of learning and teaching in higher education. However, there are questions regarding reliability of current survey-based methods to examine students’ technology use and the level of diversity discovered across both contexts of use. This suggests that further in-depth research into how students shape technology to suit their lives is required to gain a greater understanding of how technology can effectively support teaching and learning. “