September 8, 2009
E-Readers and E-Textbooks: Current Reality and Future Possibilites
An excellent online presentation was given August 26, 2009 by Jon T. Rickman (Northwest Missouri State University) and Roger Von Holzen (Northwest Missouri State University).
This (recorded - Adobe Connect) seminar initially addresses the current state of e-reader devices and their functionality as platforms for the delivery of e-textbooks, as experienced by Northwest Missouri State University in its 2008-2009 pilot study. The presenters then explore the full capabilities of e-textbooks for online, blended, and face-to-face classes, along with key practical considerations with respect to costs, infrastructure, and academic issues.
I found that this presentation answered many of the questions that have come to my mind whenever I have pondered the possibility of distributing e-readers and e-textbooks here at UMM.
https://admin.na3.acrobat.com/_a729300474/p62534536/
August 10, 2009
Which CMS is Right For You?
CMS Usage at the U of M:
Campus, Course Sections Associated with CMS Sites, Total Course Sections, Course Sections with a CMS Site
Crookston 224 498 45%
Duluth 642 2,117 31%
Morris 84 475 18%
Twin Cities 3,514 8,166 43%
All Campuses 4,464 11,256 40%
The Office of Information Technology has created a survey and information site as part of a broader effort to engage University of Minnesota students, faculty, and staff in an exploration of our future use of Course Management Systems (CMS).
This site brings together information about current CMS use and compares features between WebVista and Moodle. We hope this data will help facilitate a system-wide dialogue about future CMS options.
After reviewing the CMS information site, found at:
http://www.oit.umn.edu/cms-search
we invite U of M CMS users to discuss this topic with your colleagues, and then share your thoughts about future CMS use by completing a short survey that can be accessed from the CMS Information site, or by going directly to the survey at:
https://umsurvey.umn.edu/index.php?sid=95134&lang=um
July 21, 2009
Teach Without PowerPoint in the Classroom
José A. Bowen, a dean at Southern Methodist University, has challenged his colleagues to teach sans machines. Professors who strip high-tech gear out of their smart classrooms stand the best chance of keeping students engaged, he says.
This Chronicle of Education video drives home the point about making classroom discussion time really count.
"A Professor's Plea: Try Teaching 'Naked'"
http://chronicle.com/media/video/v55/i42/bowen/?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Related Article: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i42/42a00103.htm
May 7, 2009
E-Textbooks and "Open Textbooks"
"The ongoing digital transformation means we must continue investing to deliver great content and great tools for course management, online instruction courses, and e-books as paper-based products are replaced by electronic products." -- McGraw-Hill Chairman, Terry McGraw
Digital delivery costs less (currently about 51 percent of the price of a new print book). Digital textbookos are now beginning to gain a more prominent position in the textbooks marketplace. As they become more widely used, it is important to keep in mind that there are some issues that need to be addressed: affordability, printing options, and accessibility.
An emerging development in E-Textbooks is open textbooks, which are textbooks that are freely available with nonrestrictive licenses. Covering a wide range of disciplines, open textbooks are available to download and print in various file formats from several web sites and repositories. Open textbooks help solve the problems of the high cost of textbooks, book shortages, and access to textbooks as well as providing the capacity to better meet local teaching and learning needs.
Check out these E-textbook resources:
McGraw-Hill eBooks Online Viewing Demos
CourseSmart.com
iChapters.com
ASU to Pilot Kindle's E-Textbook Program
What are Open Textbooks?
Online 'open textbooks' save students cash
March 31, 2009
Personalized, Individual Support for Faculty
It takes time to learn new tools and software, and with everything else faculty are asked to do, technology integration is often the last on the list. Allow faculty to learn a technology gradually. Give them the basics and then let them add to their use incrementally. Give them time to learn and practice. Provide personalized, individual support. Follow-up every time and provide ongoing support.
December 16, 2008
The Collaboration Generation
"This is the Collaboration Age. We can all connect instantly across time zones and oceans. Previously impossible partnerships now produce startling innovations. And the four walls of your classroom no longer limit your students' reach.
To thrive in this always-on community, students and teachers must become agile learners, creators, and collaborators." Edutopia, December 2008/January 2009
"Tools are allowing us not only to mine the wisdom and experiences of the more than one billion people now online but also to connect with them to further our understanding of the global experience and do good work together."
For inspiration, check out these links:
http://twentyfivedays.wordpress.com (an 11-year-old community volunteer's service projects blog)
or search for bloggers with common interests at:
August 20, 2008
Anti-plagiarism tool, SafeAssign, is now available for use
Not sure what you all will think about this new tool. Last time such a tool was discussed for use at UMM (the tool at the time was Turnitin), there was some degree of controversy. SafeAssign is a plagiarism detection service available to University of Minnesota instructors who have a WebVista version 4 course or development site.
There are two ways to submit student work to the SafeAssign service. The SafeAssign Assignment tool allows students to submit work themselves. The SafeAssign Direct Submit tool allows instructors to submit papers for evaluation on a case-by-case basis, without student involvement.
Student work submitted to SafeAssign tools are checked against databases that include:
* A comprehensive index of documents available for public access on the Internet
* A store of more than 1,100 publication titles and about 2.6 million articles from the 1990s to the present, updated weekly
* Archives containing all papers submitted to SafeAssign by users in their respective institutions (e.g. the University of Minnesota)
* The Global Reference Database which contains papers volunteered by students from client institutions to help prevent cross-institutional plagiarism.
After student work is checked, both tools produce a report that shows matching sequences of words in the submitted assignment, any matching sources, and the percentage of matching words in the report.
See the U of M's website for SafeAssign: http://webvista.umn.edu/instructors/tools/safeassign.shtml
or view the
SafeAssign Online Orientation
July 16, 2008
Two-Week Technology Integration Workshop
Texas State University - San Marcos holds an annual two-week workshop for faculty. The faculty participants receive a $1,200 stipend. Across the country, a growing number of colleges and universities are offering similar programs and stipends designed to incent educators to embrace technology. The thinking behind most of these programs is simple: By offering educators an immediate motivation to embrace technology, colleges and universities hope to ensure that faculty will implement the latest and greatest technologies, and innovate with them, to bring new levels of learning to their students.
At Texas State, during the first week of the workshop, the educators attended seminars that covered instructional design concepts such as learner characteristics, course planning, types of learning, objectives, instructional strategies, assessment strategies, and media selection. During the second week, participants signed up for special-interest sessions related to learning, teaching, and technology.
At UMM, workshops have been held in the past, but incentives -- such as $1,200 stipends -- have not
been offered. Could UMM come up with a way to offer stipends to faculty participants in such a program?
See the entire article in the Campus Technology June 2008 Issue:
http://campustechnology.com/articles/63550/
June 11, 2008
Are student laptops becoming a problem in your classrooms?
Law Professors Rule Laptops Out of Order in Class
This Chronicle of Higher Education article discusses the pros and cons of allowing students to use their laptops during class. Some say the students have even approved the improvement in class discussions once the laptops were banned. Others say that sometimes the discussion is enhanced by what the students have access to on their laptops. What do you think?
May 8, 2008
Making Videos for Your Courses
Want to give your students a little bit further information about a concept? Maybe something you would like to tell them to help clarify a certain point? Some faculty are creating short video clips from their own office computer. Students are finding the videos helpful and tend to tune in to view them more than they tend to watch full captured lectures.
Find out more about this idea by reading the Chronicle of Higher Education article, "Film School: To Spice Up Course Work, Professors Make Their Own Videos."
http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i34/34a01301.htm
February 8, 2008
Which Technologies Will Shape Education in 2008?
Mobile broadband, collaborative Web technologies, and mashups will all significantly impact education over the next five years, along with "grassroots" video, collective intelligence, and "social operating systems." This according to a new report released this week by the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative, the 2008 Horizon Report.
The report focuses on the six key technology areas that the researchers identified as likely to have a major impact on "the choices of learning-focused organizations within the next five years," broken down into the technologies that will have an impact in the near term, those that are in the early stages of adoption, and those that are a bit further out on the horizon.
In the near term--that is, in the timeframe of about a year or less--the technologies that will have a significant impact on education include grassroots video and collaborative Web technologies. Grassroots video is, simply, user-generated video created on inexpensive consumer electronics devices and edited and encoded using free or inexpensive consumer- or prosumer-grade NLEs. Internet-based services supporting the sharing of these videos have allowed institutions to mingle their content with consumer content and "will fuel rapid growth among learning-focused organizations who want their content to be where the viewers are," according to the report. The second near-term trend, collaborative Web technology, is already in wide use in education at all levels. The complete report (see link below) provides further details.
In the mid-term, mobile broadband and data mashups will make their mark on education. Mashups, according to the report, will largely impact the way education institutions represent information. "While most current examples are focused on the integration of maps with a variety of data," the report said, "it is not difficult to picture broad educational and scholarly applications for mashups." Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University, and the University of Minnesota are examples of higher education institutions using mashups for learning resources and other projects. Mobile broadband too is in the early stages of adoption for educational purposes, from project-based learning activities to virtual field trips.
Further down the road, according to the report, come "collective intelligence" and "social operating systems." Collective intelligence includes wikis and community tagging. A social operating system is "the essential ingredient of next generation social networking" and "will support whole new categories of applications that weave through the implicit connections and clues we leave everywhere as we go about our lives, and use them to organize our work and our thinking around the people we know," according to the report. The time to adoption for these last two will be four to five years, the report said.
Beyond these six technologies, the report also looks at the challenges facing education institutions and the trends--or "metatrends"--that have emerged in the five years since the first edition of the report was released. The complete 2008 report is freely available online via the link below.
January 18, 2008
Social Spaces, like Facebook
Social networking within Moodle or WebVista. How to connect to your students using the tools that they use. Create a facebook group for your course. Give it a shot. Your students will receive alerts when you add content to your group page in facebook.
Alumni and Career Services. Trying to get students to connect to the University for events. Those department staff can set up a group in facebook and students and alumni can join the group and receive alerts when events are announced.
Listen to the discussion (podcast) from Penn State:
http://podcasts.psu.edu/ets_talk_05
Encouraging Faculty to Podcast
Podcasting is a simple and effective way to engage students in and out of the classroom.
- Podcasts can be used to provide feedback to students via a weekly podcast. This may be a weekly recap of the events from class.
- An instructor may wish to create usable versions of a weekly lecture so that the lecture can be automatically delivered to members of the class.
- An instructor may wish to charge students with the task of providing weekly status review in the form of an audio or video podcast.
iTunes Uhttp://www.apple.com/education/itunesu/
Getting started with Podcasting.
January 17, 2008
Go Green
How is it that Europeans manage to lead good lives, and yet only burn half as much energy per capita as Americans?
If you were designing a mass transit system for your area, how would it work? And, more importantly, how would you get people to actually trade in their cars for a ride on the bus?
If your campus was to reduce its carbon footprint, where would you start? With the lightbulb? With local food in the cafeteria? With turning down the thermostat in winter? With getting more students, staff, and faculty to walk or bike to school?
These are questions posed by Bill McKibben, the author of a dozen books on the environment, and the founder of Step It Up 2007.http://www.edutopia.org
edutopia magazine's October 2007 issue was all about "going green." You can see edutopia online at http://www.edutopia.org
See the go green database at: http://www.edutopia.org/go-green
This is a searchable database packed with online resources: links to lesson plans, green curricula, service learning opportunities, and innovative classroom projects. You can even filter your search by topic, grade level, cost, or location. These are primarily K-12 resources, but it is a great place to get some ideas.
How green is your classroom?
Start your semester with the "sustainable pencil challenge." Students must use the same refillable pen or pencil throughout the entire semester.
Save paper and ink: Encourage your students to use NetFiles to save their work. They can give you access to an individual document, or attach the document in email to you. They would not print anything and you would be able to comment and grade their assignments electronically and return the assignments to your students.
If you do need to write something down, or print something out, use recycled paper.
Be diligent about recycling or reusing as much as you can.
Your students can take paperless tests and quizzes on their computers, or via "clickers."
Shut down your computer at night, and over weekends and holidays.
See the 'Sustainability and U' site at http://www.uservices.umn.edu/sustainableU/resources.html
What can you do to go green?