This article profiles professors who are developing teaching methods and theories based on the argument that student learning is not necessarily enhanced by technology--if that technology is used to support traditional lecture-style methods. The provocative and seemingly anti-technology title of the article, "Teach Naked," is a bit of a misnomer: the faculty members profiled argue that podcasts and course content-related applications and games can both enhance outside-of-class learning and improve in-class discussions.
In this article, Chris Dede, Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies
at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, draws from literature from multiple disciplines to argue that research infrastructures should be used in an attempt to generate "wisdom." The article then proposes how Web 2.0 research tools build the capacity for wise advice.
Zotero 2.0 beta was recently released. I was using Zotero 1.0, and while it was handy, it was too difficult for me to manage my citations across the multiple computers I use. 2.0 fixes that problem with a handy sync feature that allows you to sync Zotero to multiple computers/browsers.
Zotero also allows scholars to open their research collections to others, including making them publicly available. I can follow people working in my field and have access to their source materials quickly and easily. I imagine this could enhance conversations and collaborations about ideas and research.
You can annotate your citations in Zotero. When searching common databases like JSTOR, Zotero will save the full text pdf of articles, making the full pdf searchable in the software interface.
As the first commenter at the blog post on the Chronicle noted, people have been using Skype to collaborate across distances for a while now. But it is still a good reminder that distance is coming to mean less and less in academia. We can work with anyone. We can learn from researchers in India, Antarctica, Brazil, Pequot Lakes even when our research has nothing to do with India, Antarctica, Brazil or Pequot Lakes. Imagine a world where a Public Health researcher can learn how colleagues all over the world are addressing the challenges obesity and use that knowledge to propose local solutions. Or a researcher on educational policy can get feedback on a policy draft from experts in China and India and Canada.
Our research questions, and importantly, our solutions, can pull from the best in the world, not just the best in the country. The changes happening now are remarkable.
This has been going around for a long time. But it's a good video, and I'm going to show it in a training next week, so I dug it up again.
I like that the video points out the flaws in trying to collaborate in email; most of us have been doing our work this way for so long that the inefficiency is not always obvious.
Campus Technology online reports on a Gartner study indicating that Open Source e-learning/course management systems such as Moodle and Sakai are gaining ground on commercial systems. Part of this is attributed to the uncertainty created by the Blackboard lawsuit against Desire2Learn.
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:
A university as large as the University of Minnesota can be difficult to navigate. Recently, people from across the university have taken steps to ameliorate that problem. Called “tuning,� the goal is to make the search results of the University’s website more relevant and make University offices, departments and people easier to find.
Hundreds of common search phrases have been coded into the search engine with the most likely relevant results at the top. For example, if someone now searches for “bus pass,� the top result leads to the Parking and Transportation website, where University faculty, staff and students can buy a transit pass. Before this process, the link to Parking and Transportation was tenth on the search results page.
Tuning cannot replace a good search application, but it can hopefully help visitors to the University’s website find what they are looking for. If you have any suggestions about how to improve the search results, please submit them to tel@umn.edu.
Give us your feedback
Is there a search query you think needs tuning? Have you noticed the search function is more relevant? Let us know what you think by sending an email to the Technology Enhanced Learning team at tel@umn.edu.
How to spot tuned results
Links that have been manually added for specific search queries are listed at the top of the page, with “Keymatch� to the right of the results.
