Mark James, a visiting lecturer at the University of West Florida, declared his summer course in English literature technology-free—he skipped the PowerPoint slides and YouTube videos he usually shows, and he asked students to silence their cellphones and close their laptops.

Banishing the gear improved the course, he argues. “The students seemed more involved in the discussion than when I allowed them to go online,” he told me as the summer term wound down. “They were more attentive, and we were able to go into a little more depth.”

Mr. James is not antitechnology—he said he had some success in his composition courses using an online system that’s sold with textbooks. But he is frustrated by professors and administrators who believe that injecting the latest technology into the classroom naturally improves teaching.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

New York University plans to join the growing movement to publish academic material online as free, open courseware. But in addition to giving away content—something other colleges have done—NYU plans a more ambitious experiment. The university wants to explore ways to reprogram the roles of professors in large undergraduate classes, using technology to free them up for more personal instruction.

This fall NYU will start publishing free online videos for every lecture in as many as 10 courses. They include classes on New York City history, the biology of the human body, introductory sociology, and statistics.

Previous open-courseware projects tended to be text-based, with content like syllabi and lecture notes. NYU’s site would expand the online library of academic videos available to the general public.

What’s more unusual, though, is the vision to build souped-up versions of the material for NYU students only. Freed from the copyright restrictions of publishing on the open Web, these video courses would have live links to sources discussed by professors in passing, as well as pop-up definitions and interactive quizzes.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

Q: What are the biggest technology struggles right now for online learners and teachers?

A: Unfamiliarity with the technology, for one. Instructors don’t know what’s available and how they can use it. Then unfamiliarity with online learning and what it can truly afford. Usually, the average instructor has heard horror stories about online learning being the poor cousin of face-to-face learning —which is unfortunate, because new technologies allow opportunities for enhanced interaction and enhanced pedagogies. And then the amount of time that the instructors need to launch an online class —and the extent to which that is valued from the university. For instance, if there’s no incentives to teach an online class. Or if you’re at an institution that perceives face to face as being the best mode of teaching, then you’re not encouraged actively to go figure out how to teach online.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.

» via The New York Times

… there’s little in life that’s as watching-paint-dry-dull as the traditional “library orientation” talk. You know — the one that samples all of the library’s finding aids, touches on the difference between authoritative and unreliable sources, mentions the standard reference works in a field, and breezes through a list of specialized sources that no one will remember, let alone use. In many cases it’s the same colloquy you heard when you were an undergrad, except the directions for using the card catalog don’t involve actual cards anymore.

After years of frustration, last spring I gave up on the orientation. In my mind it created three types of the students: the half who tuned out, a quarter who burned out from information overload, and a remaining quarter who insisted they’d already heard the sermon and didn’t bother to show up. More frustrating still were two post-chat patterns: one group of students routinely asked me how to do the very thing they had just been taught, and a second group never applied any of the library skills necessary to conduct their research.

Librarians are generally blameless in this. If we get a spiel out of the 1950s, it’s because much of the time we provide information no more specific than “I’m teaching [Your Course Name Here] and my students need to do research.” From such slender threads it’s difficult to fashion much more than a library sampler.

» via Inside Higher Ed

teachthinktech:

Via eSchool News:

In a finding that might surprise some people, younger teachers who are newer to the profession were no more likely to use technology than teachers with 10 or more years of experience, the study found. “Newer teachers might very well use technology more in their personal lives, but when it comes to frequency of technology use in classrooms, they don’t seem to have any edge over veteran teachers,” the report notes.

Don Knezek, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education, said this finding is supported by his own experience in talking with school administrators. Administrators tell him “they don’t have to convince new teachers to check their eMail any more,” Knezek said—but they’re still not integrating technology any more frequently in their instruction.

There could be two reasons for this, Knezek added: Either they are coming out of teacher preparation programs unprepared to integrate technology effectively, or they’re entering a school environment where they’re not encouraged to do so.

Read the full article here.

At the University of New Mexico, some students in second-year Spanish classes become detectives. They travel to Los Griegos, an Albuquerque neighborhood 15 minutes northwest of the campus, on a mission: Clear the names of four families accused of conspiring to murder a local resident.

It’s a fictional murder mystery, and instead of guns and badges, the students are armed with iPod Touches, provided by the university. When students enter their location into the wireless handheld devices, a clue might turn up: a bloody machete, for example, or a virtual character who may converse with them—in Spanish—about a suspect.

But Los Griegos and the language skills needed to navigate the locale are no fiction. By integrating mobile computing and actual surroundings, the educational game, Mentira—Spanish for “lie” and a reference to the claim of conspiracy the students are assigned to debunk—helps take teaching to a new place outside the classroom: “augmented reality.”

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

In recent years, many colleges and universities have shifted towards internet-based learning, posting everything from assignments to lectures online.  The results of a randomized experiment at a major research institution (analyzed in a new paper by David N. Figlio, Mark Rush, and Lu Yin) caution against a wholesale transformation.  The authors found “modest evidence that live-only instruction dominates internet instruction.

» via The New York Times