http://www.pbs.org/teacherline/
An online professional development program for K-12 teachers is receiving kudos from ISTE (http://www.cblohm.com/news/pbstl/PBSTL_090630/). What does this mean for the education of pre-service teachers? How old - or how experienced - do you need to be to be capable of learning how to teach online?
http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/
Back when Bruce Reeves and I did our Masters of Education thesis together, we found study after study showed that there was no significant difference in the performance of students who were studying a class at a distance and those who were studying on campus.
This website (and the corresponding book) pulls together hundreds of studies comparing online versus on-campus student performance ... which point generally to either no significant difference between them ... or that online students actually outperform their campus-based counterparts. And this result is during the infancy of online teaching, in which we are still trying to teach the old way using new tools, "blind to the possibilities of doing new and different things" (McDonald, J. (2002). Is "as good as face-to-face" as good as it gets?).
At a recent meeting, discussion grew heated over whether computers and virtual worlds would ever be useful in teaching very small children. I think part of the problem many people in education have, particularly at the higher levels of education (middle school and up), is their definition of computer.
We think computer and what comes to mind? The standard desktop or laptop computer. General purpose and versatile for the average adult, but it admittedly does not stand up will to the pounding of your average child (trust me on this .... I know from experience!). Nor is it particularly easy for the very young (or the very old) to get information OUT of (my reading glasses become increasingly necessary when looking at a laptop screen).
But the view of the mainstream user is necessarily very limited. For those of us who have backgrounds in computer science and engineering, the range of types of computers far, far larger. We see computers everywhere, from your car to specialized robots used on the international space station. While some people may gripe that "computers are everywhere", it is becoming rapidly true in most parts of the industrialized world.
Input and output devices (i.e. what you use to interact with a computer or computerized device) already have a wide range include cute little dolls like this one used with autistic children: http://www.cio.com/article/492934/Coolest_Robots_of_?page=13#slideshow.
Who knows what we will be able to produce in 5 or 10 years that will allow teachers to work at a distance with special needs children?? We may be able to spread expertise and a capacity to mentor pre-service teachers into areas where it simply is not feasible to physically send a person. But to embrace this possibility, we may have to ask faculty to rethink the definition of "computer" to include the capabilities of both experimental and playful devices -- which will become mainstream almost before we know it.
Shameless plug for my presentation at SLedCC '08 following ....
This was our team's report on the Tech Savvy Girls project's first year in Teen Second Life. The full paper should be published (eventually) in the conference proceedings. Meanwhile, interested parties can read it here or check out the slide show at Slideshare.
In short, the girls gained IT fluency throughout the year. Most encouraging was the way they learned and appreciated copyright protection on digital media because they, as creators, had to draw boundaries. Critical questions arose over how much material could be taken from others, recombined, and called one's own - which is especially difficult when collaborating with other team members.
The year was not without its challenges, but we made the most of those as learning opportunities. Two of the most successful girls had some of the greatest struggles with the technology itself. But they learned about bandwidth, RAM, FPS, etc. through those challenges and eventually became tech support for families and friends. No matter what they will eventually do in life, they know they can master technology in their lives.
Finally, while it may not be obvious in the paper, I have to point out that the people involved in this project were not physically co-located. The girls and one mentor were together much of the time, but not exclusively, while the other two mentors physically existed in different states. Outside of club meeting times (only two hours per week), all other work time was done virtually, at a distance, in Second Life.