What’s the next big thing? The Semantic Web is, according to some tech insiders (including Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Internet), the next big thing on the Internet. It is also, by extension, one of the innovations likely to dramatically affect virtual learning. The problem with the Semantic Web, or Web 3.0, as some are referring to it, is that it is still mainly conceptual, so practical implications are all conjecture. That said, the revolutionary potential of this change in the way the Internet functions makes it worth considering, particularly in regard to how it will affect education and online learning (2011 Horizon Report).
Computer chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices announced yesterday that a team of technicians overclocked their new 8-core FX processor to a speed of 8.429GHz, surpassing the previous Guinness-certified speed record of 8.309 gigahertz. For perspective, that’s triple the performance of what’s typically found inside powerful laptop.
Technology is shaping the future of education. On Tuesday, Curtis Nower teaches mass media to his class of Turner Middle School students but, this year, the sound of clicking keys on dozens of desktop computer keyboards has dropped silent. Students now create unique photographic images on an iPad and teachers create new ways to teach with the tablet computers. “I was kind of scared because there’s not like a text book, there’s no manual ‘this is how you teach with an iPad,’ so it was a lot of leg work figuring out what am I going to do with them, how am I going to make it work in the classroom,” said Nower. This is a move forward that may have intimidated teachers, but not students, which is a sign of the technological times said 14-year-old Katherine Orozco. “It’s pretty easy; it’s just like the iPod, the normal, little ones. It’s just like them but bigger with more systems and stuff; it’s quite easy. I think it’s easy, everybody’s catching onto it pretty quickly,” said Orozco. It’s also confirmation that tough financial decisions continue in Turner.
Pat Connolly started the school year with a desktop computer in his Land O’Lakes High School classroom. Less than a week after classes began, the school swapped that out for a laptop — one he really doesn’t prefer — and gave him an equipment checkout form to sign. The form, required of all teachers who received pieces of district technology, included some wording that fired up many educators like Connolly, his school’s building representative to the United School Employees of Pasco. It says that teachers have financial liability for repairs and replacement costs associated with damage from “improper use” or “negligence.” It suggests that employees could purchase private insurance to cover those costs.
“Last fall, the Big Ten Network began using Narrative Science for updates of football and basketball games. Those reports helped drive a surge in referrals to the Web site from Google’s search algorithm, which highly ranks new content on popular subjects, Mr. Calderon says. The network’s Web traffic for football games last season was 40 percent higher than in 2009. “Hanley Wood, a trade publisher for the construction industry, began using the program in August to provide monthly reports on more than 350 local housing markets, posted on its site, builderonline.com. The company had long collected the data, but hiring people to write trend articles would have been too costly, says Andrew Reid, president of Hanley Wood’s digital media and market intelligence unit. “Mr. Reid says Hanley Wood worked with Narrative Science for months to fine-tune the software for construction. A former executive at Thomson Reuters, he says he was struck by the high quality of the articles.
Students at Jack Swigert Aerospace Academy could soon be using portable computers for most of their schoolwork as the middle school shifts toward a paperless environment. If a fee structure is approved by the Colorado Springs School District 11 board on Wednesday, every student will be assigned a portable computers for use at school, with the option of taking the tech tools outside of school for homework. “Kids are coming to us more tech-savvy,” said Principal Larry Bartel, adding that the computers will make school easier for teachers and students because students will be more engaged. “It’s a different mindset,” he said. Students will have e-mail accounts and virtual storage spaces for assignments. Teachers will have virtual drop boxes to accept assignments.
The first New Tech high school opened in 1996 in Napa, Calif., a collaboration of business, community leaders and a local school corporation. At the time, local business leaders were concerned students weren’t graduating with the skills required in the new economy. After research, the groups decided on a new model that employed a style of learning meant to mirror the real world. Students work in groups, give presentations and work with people who are not their friends, just as they do in the business world. Different subjects are combined into one course, with names such as “Biocom,” in which students might complete a project that sharpens both reading and science skills. In Eagle Tech’s biocom class, for example, students were told to build a self-sustaining ecosystem that they will then present to a former employee of the Department of Natural Resources.
An August 2011 study by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce confirms what teachers, parents, and public and private sector leaders have known for years: A postsecondary education is now the gateway to the middle class. The Georgetown study indicates that the lifetime earnings for people with bachelor’s degrees are 84 percent greater than those with only a high school diploma — whose lifetime earnings translate to just over $15/hour. For the undereducated — those who have been left behind in the race between technology and education which has fueled global economic growth since World War II — today’s employment and earnings statistics are beyond dire.
Five years ago, it was a lot easier for seniors to leave computing to others, leading an unplugged life like the one they long knew. But now, observers say, people who want to communicate with their far-away grandchildren, take and archive photographs, buy music and order home movies increasingly have no choice but to take the plunge. For newcomers to the computing life, the divide can be like walking through a foreign country, said Veronica Rempusheski, professor of nursing at the University of Delaware. Many seniors don’t know what the symbol for “attachment” means, or that a big “E” stands for Internet Explorer, a starting point for Web browsing — or that there’s that other symbol for Mozilla Firefox, which will also connect to the Web, she said.
The University of California is seeking to raise money for its new online education project by finding non-UC students willing to pay for them. The UC system is expected to unveil 26 new cyber courses in January, covering topics from climate change to game theory, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday. “Some of our courses will be absolutely stunning,” said Vice Provost Daniel Greenstein, who is leading the effort. “But we’re not going to just knock people’s socks off. We want to identify what works.” UC officials had expected to raise $6 million for the pilot project, but secured only $748,000 in private funds, so the university gave the program a $6.9 million interest-free line of credit. The university hopes to repay the loan by selling at least 7,000 spots in online classes to about 5,000 non-UC students, possibly in China, Greenstein said.
With the YOUniversal Financial Aid System mobile app, students across Arkansas can check their financial aid accounts and apply for scholarships from their phones. Last week, the app won a Digital Education Achievement Award from the Center for Digital Education. The Arkansas General Assembly had long discussed creating a simplified process for students, parents and school counselors to find scholarships. Time and time again, students would qualify for one program and not know they qualified for another one, said Shane Broadway, former speaker of the house and state senator who is now the interim director of the Arkansas Department of Higher Education. And on top of that, they had to fill out a financial aid application by hand. “It was so last century I guess you would say,” Broadway said. “I mean, it was paper.”
The new Kent School District website hosts videos of students and administrators to improve communication with the community. Mississippi Plans Broadband Network for 4 Research Universities In a Washington school district, the school board established a priority of communicating effectively with the community. At the same time, Kent School District lost half of its Web team members to major budget reductions. As a result, the district re-evaluated its Web strategy and launched a new cloud-based website in 2010 that earned a Best of the Web Award from the Center for Digital Education last week. “It was partly survival and partly focused on making sure that we were doing things as efficiently as we possibly could while we worked to engage our community in all the big changes that we had scheduled ahead,” said Thuan Nguyen, chief information and operations officer.
Alabama educators share lessons, find digital resources and teach each other. And on Sept. 1, the Alabama Learning Exchange (ALEX) won a Best of the Web Award from the Center for Digital Education. In designing the website for the exchange, the Alabama Education Department made sure teachers could get where they wanted to go within three clicks. And the department added a new professional learning community section called ALEXville, said Shannon Parks, the ALEX state administrator for the Alabama Department of Education Technology Initiatives. In this community, educators who took the same professional development courses share what they learned about digital content and how they’re applying it.
How is it possible that the typical child is so much more adept at using gadgets than the typical adult? How did we come to stereotype the neighbour’s 12-year-old son as the expert who will sort out our computers, cellphones and TV programming? And why are teachers terrified of exposing their ignorance to their hyper-connected students? The answer, we are told, is that this generation of children came into the world already adept at using technology. They were “digital born” or “digital natives”. The rest of us are “digital immigrants”, who have had to learn the art, science and reality of gadgets through blood, sweat and embarrassment. It only takes a few moments of vigorous application of common sense to lay waste to this myth. A child is born today in much the same manner as a hundred years ago, before the concept of consumer technology had been imagined. Some may be surrounded, at birth, by machines that go ‘Ping’, but the sound of electronics does not imbue a comfort with electronics.
Schools need to stop ‘frowning’ on pupils using computers to learn and a closer alignment between the use of ICT inside and outside the classroom is needed, Scotland’s Education Secretary Michael Russell has said. In a blog post outlining Scottish government objectives for better use of technologies in learning, Russell warned that some schools had almost become “technology free zones”. He said that outside of school children were exposed to “rich and exciting technologies” that helped them to “learn, play, communicate, collaborate and socialize”.
I’m often engaged in the business of breaking things down for academic colleagues so that the process of designing an online learning course seems less challenging. Sometimes it feels like I’m going against the grain a bit and distilling the academic rigour of the e-learning research that I read and hear about. Actually, its more than a feeling, its a reality and a deliberate policy. I do this because its needed. Its needed for the great mass of educators not convinced by the virtues of teaching and learning using internet-based technology. The hard part is to distill and not water down or dumb down. The aim is for simplicity or to explain in simple terms that which can be seen as too complex and unwielding.
“The effective 21st-century teacher will need to be adept in judging the educative and non-educative use of technologies,” said one reader. Today’s educators are constantly evaluating the skills students need to compete in the global economy. But what are the characteristics or skills needed to be an effective 21st-century educator? We recently asked readers: “What are the qualities of an effective 21st-century educator?” Here are our readers’ top responses. You might have heard that an effective 21st-century educator should be a “guide on the side,” not a “sage on the stage,” but according to readers, there’s much more to it than that.
For incoming freshmen at western Connecticut’s suburban Brookfield High School, hefting a backpack weighed down with textbooks is about to give way to tapping out notes and flipping electronic pages on a glossy iPad tablet computer. A few hours away, every student at Burlington High School near Boston also will start the year with new school-issued iPads, each loaded with electronic textbooks and other online resources in place of traditional bulky texts.
Arizona’s Vail School District, one of the first districts in the nation to move to an all-digital curriculum, used its textbook money to buy laptops—forcing the teachers to learn how to instruct differently. Nearly one year after a a pilot program that put Virginia’s fourth, seventh, and ninth grade social studies curriculum on an iPad, Virginia state officials say they have learned much from the implementation. The program, which is a collaboration between education publishing giant Pearson and the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE), was spawned from VDOE’s “Beyond Textbooks” initiative, which encourages schools to “explore the potential of wireless technology and digital textbooks to enhance teaching and learning.” Now a year into the program, many challenges and benefits have emerged.
A new Goodwill computer store held it’s grand opening on Friday. The Computer Works retail store on Rivers Avenue in North Charleston employs about 8 people and is accepting computer donations. The new computer center will also provide technology training for veterans and people with disabilities. Goodwill says if you would like to donate any computer, printers, cell phones, or gaming equipment you can drop it all off at the new computer store, or any neighborhood Goodwill store location.
JStor, an organization that maintains a database of academic journal articles, is making about 6 percent of its content available to the public for free—articles that were published prior to 1923 in the United States or before 1870 in other countries. It’s a small step, but it’s an important one, because it is a recognition by JStor that it should make its stockpile of academic knowledge more broadly accessible. That issue has become contentious in recent years, especially with the arrest this summer of Aaron Swartz, a 24-year-old Internet activist who is charged with sneaking into MIT to download 4.8 million articles from JStor’s archive. He and other advocates of “open access” have complained that many articles in research journals are accessible only with expensive subscriptions, limiting their audience to elite readers even though the Internet should be facilitating a flourishing of access to information. Harvard scholar Lawrence Lessig blames, among other things, outdated interpretations of copyright law; Swartz has cited greed among publishers of journal articles.
