Teaching with Technology @ Tuftstag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2010:/id//32009-10-20T15:00:31ZInsights, questions, and ideas on the application of technology to teaching and learning.Movable Type 3.31Openness Series - Open Accesstag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2009:/id//3.71012009-10-16T15:28:03Z2009-10-20T15:00:31ZToday's post is part 1 of a series on Openness that I plan to do over the next few weeks. Open Access and the Crisis in Scholarly Publishing In honor of Open Access Week I thought it fitting to launch...Hannah H. Reeves
Open Access and the Crisis in Scholarly Publishing
In honor of Open Access Week I thought it fitting to launch a series on openness with a post on the Open Access movement and it's increasing relevance to universities such as Tufts.
For readers who may be new to the subject, the open access movement got its start in December 2001 at a conference hosted by the Open Society Institute of Budapest, where scholars assembled to express support for open access to scientific and scholarly journal literature. The simplest definition of OA, arising out of this conference, holds that open access literature is literature that is scholarly in nature, digital, available online, free of charge and free or most copyright and licensing restrictions.
The primary driver behind the open access movement has been changes in the scholarly publishing industry, which have resulted in skyrocketing prices and the inability of libraries to keep up with subscriptions to scholarly journals. Over the past several years, journal prices have risen 320% while library budgets have increased by a fraction of that amount. Tufts University currently spends $4 million on journal subscriptions. The skyrocketing costs of academic journals limits the ability of university libraries to keep up their subscriptions and in turn greatly reduces dissemination of scholarly research. By removing price and permission barriers that often limit access to scholarly publications, open access publishing offers the potential to mitigate this crisis in scholarly communication and to ensure wider dissemination of academic research and knowledge at greatly reduced costs to scholars and institutions. Equally as important, it allows authors to retain more of their intellectual property.
There are many things that academics and institutions can do to increase the impact of their research and help mitigate the crisis in scholarly publishing. Chief among these is to Manage your intellectual property by negotiating with publishers. Most journals require authors to sign a copyright transfer agreement upon publication, which cedes copyright to the publisher. Increasingly however, publishers are allowing authors to retain portions of their copyright through the use of an author addendum or amendment to publication agreement. Signing an amendment to publication enables an author to retain more rights over the use of their publication and to upload a copy of their work to an institutional repository that's open. Another way of promoting open access is to use alternative methods of publishing such as self-archiving in open access repositories or publishing in open access journals, an increasing number of which are peer-reviewed and considered high-impact. Finally, support sustainable scholarly communication by wielding influence with your publishers, becoming a proponent in your department for open access, and support legislation to make publicly funded research free.
For more information on Open Access at Tufts, see the Scholarly Communication Team website.
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Social Media Part I: What's in your Network? tag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2009:/id//3.65742009-07-20T14:50:21Z2009-07-20T16:47:49ZOne of the most exciting and potentially disruptive developments in the realm of teaching with technology is the growth of social media. Loosely defined, social media are inexpensive and accessible tools that enable users to create and publish content on...Hannah H. ReevesLearn More about Social Media Tools and Resources at Tufts*Blogs*Wikis*Podcasts *Video/YouTube
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Friday's Pick: FAST - Assessing Teaching Tooltag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2008:/id//3.33872008-02-22T19:44:54Z2008-02-22T20:07:04Z In catching up with what is new in MERLOT, I read that the online Free Assessment Summary Tool (FAST) had received their Classics Award. FAST is an anonymous online survey tool that automatically summarizes students' impressions of a course...Paula Vincinihttp://at.tccs.tufts.edu
In catching up with what is new in MERLOT, I read that the online Free Assessment Summary Tool (FAST) had received their Classics Award.
FAST is an anonymous online survey tool that automatically summarizes students' impressions of a course and/or teacher and supplies the data directly to the instructor. It is completely web based, password protected, anonymous, and instantaneously updated.
According to their mission statement, the FAST initiative will "provide professional, technical and academic advice to faculty who wish to become more informed about the teaching and learning process through the application of faculty-administered, anonymous online student feedback."
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Traditionally, summative teaching assessments conducted at the end of a course are not timely enough to really impact the redesign of a course to better meet student goals. Formative feedback during the course " opens a proactive dialogue with students about teaching, the course, and the entire learning process" according to the FAST site.
Friday's Pick: Immersive Education tag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2007:/id//3.26822007-12-14T22:17:10Z2008-01-23T21:14:27ZThe Immersive Education Initiative has certainly been in the news recently. This "international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia and companies" is working to support online education using 3-D virtual platforms. In December, Harvard sponsored an Immersive Education Event...Paula Vincinihttp://at.tccs.tufts.edu
Immersive Education Initiative has certainly been in the news recently. This "international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia and companies" is working to support online education using 3-D virtual platforms. In December, Harvard sponsored an Immersive Education Event and on January 22, at the Boston Digital Media Summit, the Immersive Education Initiative announced the creation of the "Education Grid and corresponding Platform Ecosystem" which will provide educators with "a comprehensive end-to-end infrastructure for a new generation of virtual world learning environments, interactive learning games, and simulations."
The first three platforms in the ecosystem are Second Life, Sun Microsystems Laboratory's Project Wonderland, and Croquet. According to a Media Grid announcement:
"These platforms will be enhanced to utilize the server-side Education Grid that will deliver a rich library of learning objects, digital media assets, learning games and services from which a wide variety of Immersive Education experiences can be assembled."
Since 2004, Boston College students have been using a version of the Immersive Education platform to take courses. You can read more about how the Immersive Education platform was used with students in The Wired Campus article 'Immersive Education' Submerges Students in Online Worlds Made for Learning.
The platform includes:
"interactive 3D graphics, commercial game and simulation technology, virtual reality, voice chat (Voice over IP/VoIP), Web cameras (webcams) and rich digital media with collaborative online course environments and classrooms."
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Project to Build Virtual Learning Platform Within Popular Online Worlds Wins Financial Support
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Friday's Pick: Sharing Pre-Publication Researchtag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2007:/id//3.26742007-12-13T13:22:22Z2008-01-23T20:35:37ZLast fall I wrote about Zotero, a free Firefox extension that enables faculty to collect, manage, and cite their research from George Mason University. In December Zotero was in the news again with their partnership with the non-profit Internet Archive...Paula Vincinihttp://at.tccs.tufts.edu
Zotero, a free Firefox extension that enables faculty to collect, manage, and cite their research from George Mason University. In December Zotero was in the news again with their partnership with the non-profit Internet Archive to create a shared online database for scholars to upload their notes, photographs, digital scans of research documents, and other data from their hard drives.
This opening up of private research materials before publication may be counter to the usual university research culture of waiting until publication for research to be shared but the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded $514,000 to the Center for History and New Media at George Mason to support the effort, and gave more than $700,000 more to the Internet Archive for the project according to an article in The Wired Campus.
The Zotero-IA alliance will create a “Zotero Commons” into which scholarly materials can be added simply via the Zotero client, according to Dan Cohen, the Director of the Center.
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reported that the Internet Archive is promising an "added incentive " for scholars to share - "researchers who upload scanned files of books or other documents, the archive will perform a full-text conversion and e-mail back a text document that can be easily searched (picturefiles of documents are not usually searchable)."
To read more about this new partnership, read Zotero and the Internet Archive Join Forces.
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Friday's Pick: Copyright Confusiontag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2007:/id//3.26292007-11-21T15:54:35Z2008-01-23T20:11:37Z“The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy,” released by the American University’s Center for Social Media, is based on interviews that university researchers conducted with more than 60 media-literacy educators. Those interviews reveal that "educators today have no consensus...Paula Vincinihttp://at.tccs.tufts.edu
The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy,” released by the American University’s Center for Social Media, is based on interviews that university researchers conducted with more than 60 media-literacy educators. Those interviews reveal that "educators today have no consensus around what constitutes acceptable fair use practices" according to the Center.
The interviews also highlight how "as a result of poor guidance, counterproductive guidelines, and fear, teachers use less effective teaching techniques, teach and transmit erroneous copyright information, fail to share innovative instructional approaches, and do not take advantage of new digital platforms."]]>
The Center for Social Media is is part of the School of Communication at American University. It "showcases and analyzes strategies to use media as creative tools for public knowledge and action. It focuses on social documentaries for civil society and democracy, and on the public media environment that supports them." They also have a great section on Copyright and Fair Use in Teaching and in Documentary Film. With many of our students "mashing up" videos, music, and images and posting them to YouTube and other social networking sites, being clear about copyright is becoming more important in higher education.]]>
Friday's Pick: A Vision of Students Today tag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2007:/id//3.25342007-11-02T15:38:53Z2007-11-06T19:54:43ZMuch is being written about the characteristics of the Net Generation learner in higher education but if you have a moment (about 4 minutes actually), check out the video on YouTube - A Vision of Students Today.. Or better yet,...Paula Vincinihttp://at.tccs.tufts.edu
Net Generation learner in higher education but if you have a moment (about 4 minutes actually), check out the video on YouTube - A Vision of Students Today.. Or better yet, watch the first video of this three-part series, Information R/evolution and then watch the Vision video.
This example of "digital ethnography" comes from a "working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography" led by Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State.
Two hundred of his Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 2007 students assisted with the creation of the Vision video "...to call attention to the growing gap between how our students learn and how we choose to teach them", according to comments by Wesch. The Vision video is Part Two of a three-part series on higher education that Wesch is producing.
According to Wesch, "It began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in."
You can read more about this video, including its transcript in the blog Digital Ethnography. You can also read comments to the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus posting about the video here.
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Web 2.0:The Machine is Us/ing Us" video about Web 2.0 that made the rounds in the ed tech community last spring. It won a 2007 Rave Award from Wired Magazine. Another project from the Digital Anthropology group is the Digital Ethnography of YouTube Project.
Wesch describes himself in this way: "I have the coolest job in the world, organizing massive teams of K-State students into global citizens working for a better tomorrow."
I'm looking forward to the third video in the series which will be "an exploration of different teaching technologies and the ways in which they shape the learning environment for better and for worse."]]>
Friday's Pick: Disconnecting Africa tag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2007:/id//3.24782007-10-12T16:55:57Z2007-10-12T19:37:25ZI haven't heard much recently about the digital divide - a term coined to "represent the gap between those with regular, effective access to digital and information technology, and those without this access," according to Wikipedia. However, while looking at...Paula Vincinihttp://at.tccs.tufts.edu
digital divide - a term coined to "represent the gap between those with regular, effective access to digital and information technology, and those without this access," according to Wikipedia.
However, while looking at Tufts University School of Medicine student Catherine Hooper's Journey to Africa digital story, I was struck by the thought that many of the students and faculty in Tanzania may not be able to watch this report as easily as I was. Hooper traveled to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where she helped establish a link between the Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK) and Muhimbili University College of Health Sciences.
A recent article in Business Daily by Harvard Professor Calestous Juma makes the following points about the growing digital chasm in higher education in Africa:
"Most faculty and students have no reliable Internet access. African universities of the size of the University of California have the Internet capability of a single US household."
"Africa (other than South Africa) is currently linked to the developed world by a single fiber-optic cable down the West Africa coast. It is the most digitally-isolated region on the globe."]]>
The Partnership for Higher Education in Africa will help them connect to the same vast teaching, learning and research resources that we take for granted.
One promising programs sponsored by the Partnership is the Bandwidth Consortium.
"With support from four major U.S. foundations, and in collaboration with the African Virtual University (AVU), a coalition of 11 African universities and two higher education organizations arrived at an agreement with the satellite service provider, Intelsat, to bring vastly expanded Internet bandwidth capacity and capability, at approximately one-third the cost, to academic institutions on the continent."
If as Professor Juma asserts, "Access to knowledge is the lifeline of knowledge-based institutions," then it is crucial for U.S. university researchers, faculty and students to be sensitive to the very real constraints their colleagues have in Africa.
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Friday's Pick: Avatars, The Second Life of PhDs tag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2007:/id//3.23872007-09-28T21:09:06Z2008-04-01T22:28:03ZWhether or not you have ventured into Second Life and have your own avatar, you may have heard about it and that universities are beginning to create virtual campuses, teach online courses, and have virtual meetings there. Some in higher...Paula Vincinihttp://at.tccs.tufts.edu
Image is from Boise State University's edtech Island video on YouTube.
Professor Avatar: In the digital universe of Second Life, classroom instruction also takes on a new personality
This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education online describes various ways Second Life is being used by academics and universities. While you are there, take the tour of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's campus in Second Life and if you aren't quite willing to venture into Second Life itself, check out the videos in YouTube using "university second life" as your search terms.
Edward L. Lamoureux, an associate professor in Bradley University's multimedia program is teaching his second ethnography class online in Second Life. One of the reasons for teaching in Second Life was to enable undergraduate "field" research which is evidently considered a bit risky in downtown Peoria, Illinois where Bradley is located.
Evidently the New Media Consortium, a nonprofit higher-education technology group, has been providing the technical support and space Lamoureux's class but soon Bradley will have its own Second Life campus.]]>
Sarah B. Robbins, a doctoral student in rhetoric and composition at Ball State University has been teaching in freshman English-composition classes in Second Life since the fall of 2006 (was that only last year?). According to the article: "Her students' writings are based on their research and observations in Second Life. Composition topics have included how avatars form communities and online identities versus real-life identities."
And if you do decide to take the plunge into Second Life, be sure and check out Vassar College's recreation of the Sistine Chapel created by Steve Taylor , Vassar director of academic computing services.
Beth L. Ritter-Guth, an English instructor at Lehigh Carbon Community College and an adjunct at DeSales University, created "Literature Alive, a Second Life project that engages students and other visitors in reading by guiding their avatars on tours of pixilated versions of famous literary spots."
AJ Kelton, director of technology services at Montclair State's College of Humanities and Social Sciences, imagined "the ideal college campus" and then created a virtual version in Second Life. Phillip D. Long, associate director of the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, designed MIT's island with most of island dedicated to student projects so that it serves as a virtual laboratory for the students. The New Media Consortium did the construction for this project too.
Friday's Pick: Instruction 2.0tag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2007:/id//3.21052007-09-07T19:52:14Z2007-11-11T20:47:42ZThe new EDUCAUSE Quarterly is online and the article Top-Ten Teaching and Learning Issues, 2007 was especially interesting to me as an instructional designer. And the Top 10 are - 1. Establishing and supporting a culture of evidence 2. Demonstrating...Paula Vincinihttp://at.tccs.tufts.edu
EDUCAUSE Quarterly is online and the article Top-Ten Teaching and Learning Issues, 2007 was especially interesting to me as an instructional designer.
And the Top 10 are -
1. Establishing and supporting a culture of evidence
2. Demonstrating improvement of learning
3. Translating learning research into practice
4. Selecting appropriate models and strategies for e-learning
5. Providing tools to meet growing student expectations
6. Providing professional development and support to new audiences
7. Sharing content, applications, and application development
8. Protecting institutional data
9. Addressing emerging ethical challenges
10. Understanding the evolving role of academic technologists
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Just as emerging Web 2.0 technologies are clearly reshaping the Web and online media, innovations in instructional practice and academic technology are now clearly moving higher education in new directions.
In terms of my chosen profession, the ACTL emphasizes that academic technologists "are increasingly expected to become more systematic and reflective in our approaches to transforming and assessing teaching and learning." Some of the highlights for me in this article include:
* Due to the report from U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, universities are focusing on accountability and this "will place demands on academic technology units by focusing attention on how course management systems (CMSs), e-portfolios, and emerging learning outcomes systems."
* One of the greatest challenges facing academic technologists is translating recent research on learning, teaching methods, and cognitive science into practical active learning techniques that meet faculty's needs. This research must be synthesized and summarized in a "jargon-free way."
* There is a tension between this Net Generation's social, collaborative and multi-disciplinary model of using technology to quickly create and share content and "faculty self-identification with a specific academic discipline"
* Academic technologists should begin to think of themselves as "data stewards" as technology applications such as Learning Management Systems (Blackboard, Angel, Moodle) e-portfolios, classroom response systems, and online collaboration systems (wikis) have evolved to manage and collect an "enormous amount of diverse educational data." This stewardship model will help us "develop innovative and productive ways to use this information to benefit the institution."
As the new academic year progresses, it will be interesting to see which of these issues will have the greatest impact.
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Friday's Pick: Fluidtag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2007:/id//3.20742007-08-31T16:27:27Z2007-08-31T17:01:10ZFluid is a worldwide collaborative project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to "to address the values of usability, accessibility, internationalization, quality assurance and security within academic software projects." Members are from the Sakai, uPortal, Moodle, and Kuali Student...Paula Vincinihttp://at.tccs.tufts.edu
Fluid is a worldwide collaborative project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to "to address the values of usability, accessibility, internationalization, quality assurance and security within academic software projects."
Members are from the Sakai, uPortal, Moodle, and Kuali Student communities and their goal is to "help improve the user experience of community source web applications."
This is a project that is well worth watching as it is sometimes difficult in academic software projects to truly involve potential users in an iterative software design process beyond basic user testing. This project hopes to "help address the diverse needs represented within education, including needs related to ability, language, culture, discipline and institutional conventions."
To help achieve and disseminate this goal, the Fluid team is developing and will freely distribute a library of sharable customizable user interfaces "designed to improve the user experience of web applications."
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walkthroughs that others can use as models.
For example, in the Fluid wiki, you see a Fluid UX Walkthrough Protocol, as well as Walkthrough Checklist and Report Template.
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Friday's Pick: SciVeetag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2007:/id//3.20652007-08-24T18:44:05Z2008-04-01T22:27:27ZThe National Science Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center have collaborated to support a site that is being billed as a "You Tube for Scientists" - SciVee. SciVee's goal is the "widespread dissemination and...Paula Vincinihttp://at.tccs.tufts.edu
SciVee.
SciVee's goal is the "widespread dissemination and comprehension of science." To reach this goal, scientists are invited to upload a video and synchronize it to their research papers. They can also publish podcasts, jand oin a disciplinary communities of scientists.
From their About page:
"SciVee allows scientists to communicate their work as a multimedia presentation incorporated with the content of their published article. Other scientists can freely view uploaded presentations and engage in virtual discussions with the author and other viewers. SciVee also facilitates the creation of communities around specific articles and keywords. Use this medium to meet peers and future collaborators that share your particular research interests." ]]>
Scitalks. The Academic category helps you narrow down talks with more relevance to your students.
According to the SciTalks blog:
"Scitalks is the brainchild of Sam Bogoch. He realized that his wife, Ann Senghas, a psychology professor at Barnard, needed an appropriate place to upload and post lectures on emerging sign languages."
The editors "comb the internet" and connect to videos from universities and institutions like TED talks and the Royal Society. They also include videos that appear on YouTube and Google videos. One feature you will notice is that the talks are "starred" depending on how viewers voted on them. You can even create your own "playlists" that you can share.
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Friday's Pick: nanoHUBtag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2007:/id//3.20492007-08-17T22:00:29Z2007-08-17T22:12:55ZI wanted to share with you this very interesting article about Purdue University's and the National Science Foundations's nanoHUB site, an online portal for nanotechnology researchers, instructors, and students created by Purdue University and the NSF. This "authentic learning case...Paula Vincinihttp://at.tccs.tufts.edu
article about Purdue University's and the National Science Foundations's nanoHUB site, an online portal for nanotechnology researchers, instructors, and students created by Purdue University and the NSF.
This "authentic learning case study" is an EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) white paper published in early August. This is an amazing virtual toolkit where students and faculty contribute to the science of nanotechnology and perform experiments without downloading software. But more than that, I felt it was a great article that shows how a project that started out as a collaboration and research tool serving faculty has now also developed into a robust teaching and learning site as well.
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The nanoHUB portal enables users to access scientific tools for research, demonstration and collaboration and as a resource to lectures, workshops, curricula, simulations, animations, videos and podcasts. Registration for a username and password is free and open to the public with more than 19,000 users in 2006 and so far in 2007, more than 1000 national and international researchers each month according to the article. The majority of users come from academia - either, students, faculty or staff.
I really liked the emphasis on collaboration, creating user groups and easy content or tool contribution. I don't know if you have heard about this project since nanoHUB has been around since its launch in 2003, but with this new ELI article spotlighting the site, you may want to revisit. nanoHUB certainly got me excited about nanotechnology.
Friday's Pick: Tufts' Spark Recognized as Campus Technology Innovatortag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2007:/id//3.11632007-08-03T16:27:30Z2007-08-03T21:57:20ZThis has been an exciting week for Tufts University Information Technology (UIT) as the UIT Spark suite of communication and collaboration tools was recognized as the winner of the 2007 Campus Technology Innovator - Social/Community Networking category. Tufts was one...Paula Vincinihttp://at.tccs.tufts.edu
Tufts was one of 338 institutions submitting nominations for the 13 categories in the competition. You can read a case study about Spark in the August issue of Campus Technology.. Students, faculty, staff and others in the Tufts community can currently create blogs, wikis, or asynchronous discussions with Spark, as well as syndicating podcasts from the site.
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The article describes the goal of Spark as encouraging “authentic and novel academic connections across the campus community.” With the guidance of project lead David Grogan, manager of the Curricular Technology Group, Academic Technology, UIT, the team of developers chose the Movable Type blog system from Six Apart, the Confluence wiki system from Atlassian, and used the JForum discussion tool, as well as designing a podcast publication utility.
After creating a Web interface for the first four tools in the suite, the team launched the first version of Spark in September 2006.This summer the team is implementing a “variety of enhancements” that will increase usability and “make content more visible, to encourage discovery and connection-making.”
Friday's Pick: LibraryThing - Web 2.0 for Bookstag:blogs.uit.tufts.edu,2007:/id//3.11372007-07-13T16:50:39Z2007-11-11T20:50:05ZI was reading the Institute for the Future of the Book's if:book blog when a posting about LibraryThing jumped out at me. As I am immersed in the world of academics and technology, this Web 2.0 site called a "Facebook...Paula Vincinihttp://at.tccs.tufts.edu
Institute for the Future of the Book's if:book blog when a posting about LibraryThing jumped out at me. As I am immersed in the world of academics and technology, this Web 2.0 site called a "Facebook for books" is a great example of how online social software is bringing people together in ways never before imagined.
At its most basic level, LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. A free account permits you to catalog up to 200 books. But with tagging, a blog, groups and a discussion board, it is so much more. So far members have catalogued more than 16 million books
If you have been wondering about why our students are so interested in participating in social networking groups such as Facebook, note this comment from a user of Library Thing:
"Perhaps my favorite thing about LibraryThing is that you can track down someone who shares your tastes and request a direct recommendation or ask them if a book you're thinking of buying is any good."]]>
Institute for the Future of the Book. I talked about HASTAC last week and the Institute is sponsoring a HASTAC paper The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.
The first draft of this paper, written for the MacArthur program, is online as a wiki and enables "anyone to edit it, make comments, and contribute examples of innovative work."
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According to their mission statement, the FAST initiative will "provide professional, technical and academic advice to faculty who wish to become more informed about the teaching and learning process through the application of faculty-administered, anonymous online student feedback."
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Traditionally, summative teaching assessments conducted at the end of a course are not timely enough to really impact the redesign of a course to better meet student goals. Formative feedback during the course " opens a proactive dialogue with students about teaching, the course, and the entire learning process" according to the FAST site.
This example of "digital ethnography" comes from a "working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography" led by Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State.
Two hundred of his Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 2007 students assisted with the creation of the Vision video "...to call attention to the growing gap between how our students learn and how we choose to teach them", according to comments by Wesch. The Vision video is Part Two of a three-part series on higher education that Wesch is producing.
According to Wesch, "It began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in."
You can read more about this video, including its transcript in the blog Digital Ethnography. You can also read comments to the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus posting about the video here.
]]>
Web 2.0:The Machine is Us/ing Us" video about Web 2.0 that made the rounds in the ed tech community last spring. It won a 2007 Rave Award from Wired Magazine. Another project from the Digital Anthropology group is the Digital Ethnography of YouTube Project.
Wesch describes himself in this way: "I have the coolest job in the world, organizing massive teams of K-State students into global citizens working for a better tomorrow."
I'm looking forward to the third video in the series which will be "an exploration of different teaching technologies and the ways in which they shape the learning environment for better and for worse."]]>
However, while looking at Tufts University School of Medicine student Catherine Hooper's Journey to Africa digital story, I was struck by the thought that many of the students and faculty in Tanzania may not be able to watch this report as easily as I was. Hooper traveled to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where she helped establish a link between the Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK) and Muhimbili University College of Health Sciences.
A recent article in Business Daily by Harvard Professor Calestous Juma makes the following points about the growing digital chasm in higher education in Africa:
"Most faculty and students have no reliable Internet access. African universities of the size of the University of California have the Internet capability of a single US household."
"Africa (other than South Africa) is currently linked to the developed world by a single fiber-optic cable down the West Africa coast. It is the most digitally-isolated region on the globe."]]>
The Partnership for Higher Education in Africa will help them connect to the same vast teaching, learning and research resources that we take for granted.
One promising programs sponsored by the Partnership is the Bandwidth Consortium.
"With support from four major U.S. foundations, and in collaboration with the African Virtual University (AVU), a coalition of 11 African universities and two higher education organizations arrived at an agreement with the satellite service provider, Intelsat, to bring vastly expanded Internet bandwidth capacity and capability, at approximately one-third the cost, to academic institutions on the continent."
If as Professor Juma asserts, "Access to knowledge is the lifeline of knowledge-based institutions," then it is crucial for U.S. university researchers, faculty and students to be sensitive to the very real constraints their colleagues have in Africa.
]]>
And the Top 10 are -
1. Establishing and supporting a culture of evidence
2. Demonstrating improvement of learning
3. Translating learning research into practice
4. Selecting appropriate models and strategies for e-learning
5. Providing tools to meet growing student expectations
6. Providing professional development and support to new audiences
7. Sharing content, applications, and application development
8. Protecting institutional data
9. Addressing emerging ethical challenges
10. Understanding the evolving role of academic technologists
]]>
Just as emerging Web 2.0 technologies are clearly reshaping the Web and online media, innovations in instructional practice and academic technology are now clearly moving higher education in new directions.
In terms of my chosen profession, the ACTL emphasizes that academic technologists "are increasingly expected to become more systematic and reflective in our approaches to transforming and assessing teaching and learning." Some of the highlights for me in this article include:
* Due to the report from U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, universities are focusing on accountability and this "will place demands on academic technology units by focusing attention on how course management systems (CMSs), e-portfolios, and emerging learning outcomes systems."
* One of the greatest challenges facing academic technologists is translating recent research on learning, teaching methods, and cognitive science into practical active learning techniques that meet faculty's needs. This research must be synthesized and summarized in a "jargon-free way."
* There is a tension between this Net Generation's social, collaborative and multi-disciplinary model of using technology to quickly create and share content and "faculty self-identification with a specific academic discipline"
* Academic technologists should begin to think of themselves as "data stewards" as technology applications such as Learning Management Systems (Blackboard, Angel, Moodle) e-portfolios, classroom response systems, and online collaboration systems (wikis) have evolved to manage and collect an "enormous amount of diverse educational data." This stewardship model will help us "develop innovative and productive ways to use this information to benefit the institution."
As the new academic year progresses, it will be interesting to see which of these issues will have the greatest impact.
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Members are from the Sakai, uPortal, Moodle, and Kuali Student communities and their goal is to "help improve the user experience of community source web applications."
This is a project that is well worth watching as it is sometimes difficult in academic software projects to truly involve potential users in an iterative software design process beyond basic user testing. This project hopes to "help address the diverse needs represented within education, including needs related to ability, language, culture, discipline and institutional conventions."
To help achieve and disseminate this goal, the Fluid team is developing and will freely distribute a library of sharable customizable user interfaces "designed to improve the user experience of web applications."
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walkthroughs that others can use as models.
For example, in the Fluid wiki, you see a Fluid UX Walkthrough Protocol, as well as Walkthrough Checklist and Report Template.
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SciVee's goal is the "widespread dissemination and comprehension of science." To reach this goal, scientists are invited to upload a video and synchronize it to their research papers. They can also publish podcasts, jand oin a disciplinary communities of scientists.
From their About page:
"SciVee allows scientists to communicate their work as a multimedia presentation incorporated with the content of their published article. Other scientists can freely view uploaded presentations and engage in virtual discussions with the author and other viewers. SciVee also facilitates the creation of communities around specific articles and keywords. Use this medium to meet peers and future collaborators that share your particular research interests." ]]>
Scitalks. The Academic category helps you narrow down talks with more relevance to your students.
According to the SciTalks blog:
"Scitalks is the brainchild of Sam Bogoch. He realized that his wife, Ann Senghas, a psychology professor at Barnard, needed an appropriate place to upload and post lectures on emerging sign languages."
The editors "comb the internet" and connect to videos from universities and institutions like TED talks and the Royal Society. They also include videos that appear on YouTube and Google videos. One feature you will notice is that the talks are "starred" depending on how viewers voted on them. You can even create your own "playlists" that you can share.
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This "authentic learning case study" is an EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) white paper published in early August. This is an amazing virtual toolkit where students and faculty contribute to the science of nanotechnology and perform experiments without downloading software. But more than that, I felt it was a great article that shows how a project that started out as a collaboration and research tool serving faculty has now also developed into a robust teaching and learning site as well.
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The nanoHUB portal enables users to access scientific tools for research, demonstration and collaboration and as a resource to lectures, workshops, curricula, simulations, animations, videos and podcasts. Registration for a username and password is free and open to the public with more than 19,000 users in 2006 and so far in 2007, more than 1000 national and international researchers each month according to the article. The majority of users come from academia - either, students, faculty or staff.
I really liked the emphasis on collaboration, creating user groups and easy content or tool contribution. I don't know if you have heard about this project since nanoHUB has been around since its launch in 2003, but with this new ELI article spotlighting the site, you may want to revisit. nanoHUB certainly got me excited about nanotechnology.
At its most basic level, LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. A free account permits you to catalog up to 200 books. But with tagging, a blog, groups and a discussion board, it is so much more. So far members have catalogued more than 16 million books
If you have been wondering about why our students are so interested in participating in social networking groups such as Facebook, note this comment from a user of Library Thing:
"Perhaps my favorite thing about LibraryThing is that you can track down someone who shares your tastes and request a direct recommendation or ask them if a book you're thinking of buying is any good."]]>
Institute for the Future of the Book. I talked about HASTAC last week and the Institute is sponsoring a HASTAC paper The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.
The first draft of this paper, written for the MacArthur program, is online as a wiki and enables "anyone to edit it, make comments, and contribute examples of innovative work."
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