Technology Enhanced Learning at the University of Minnesota

Eszter Hargittai, a professor and researcher at Northwestern University, discusses the assumptions many of us in higher education make about how much students understand about Web technology. She notes, for example, that few students understand what BCC (blind carbon copy) means or what RSS does.

Dr. Hargittai’s larger body of research relates to inequality and technology use. She has published on the demographic differences of users and non-users of technology and also on how people of different demographics use the same technologies in different ways.

Continue reading "Digital Natives may understand much less than we think" »

Posted at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In March 2008, the Dean Saul Levmore at the University of Chicago Law School announced internet access would be blocked in campus classrooms. According to Inside Higher Ed, Levmore wrote the following in an email to students:

“You know better than I that for many students class has come to consist of some listening but also plenty of e-mailing, shopping, news browsing, and gossip-site visiting. Many students say that the visual images on classmates’ screens are diverting, and they too eventually go off track and check e-mail, sometimes to return to the class discussion and sometimes barely so. Our faculty (and I, as well as many of your classmates with whom I have spoken) believe strongly that we need to do everything we can to make Chicago’s classroom experiences all they can be.”

I certainly understand the impulse to ban internet access in the classroom; I have observed classes with students surfing all manner of sites. It is distracting to the students nearby. It limits the depth of discussions you can have in class if students are distracted. Even in a large lecture class, I assume it is also frustrating to the professor. Most of us can tell when our audience is not listening.

Continue reading "Banning laptops in the classroom" »

Posted at 03:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New Media Consortium released the 2008 Horizon report at the Educause Leadership Initiatives conference in San Antonio this week. The Horizon Project discusses emerging technologies that will strongly influence teaching and learning at colleges and universities. The emerging technologies the Horizon Report discusses for 2008 include:

• Grassroots video
  
• Collaboration webs
  
• Mobile broadband
  
• Data mashups
  
• Collective intelligence
  
• Social operating systems

Continue reading "The 2008 Horizon Report is released" »

Posted at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)