Educational Technology

by the American Press

At this time 75 years ago, Calcasieu Parish voters were going to the polls to vote on a bond issue to make a junior college possible for Southwest Louisiana. This vote was part of the beginning of what would become McNeese State University. A major part of the motivation for the parents of our area in approving this bond issue, was to make a college education more accessible for their children. Today, in the early 21st century, a college education is being made even more accessible through the wonder of the Internet.

http://www.americanpress.com/AP-Editorial-3-12-13

By Tim Martin, mLive

An organization created by the state of Michigan to advance online learning is releasing a report that calls for more focus on personalized learning for K-12 students. The report released today by the Michigan Virtual University also says the state should take steps to support the transition. The report calls for Gov. Rick Snyder to “appoint an independent authority to evaluate the quality of content providers.” The recommendation applies to online course providers as well as new operators of K-12 school environments, according to the Michigan Virtual University.

http://www.mlive.com/education/index.ssf/2013/03/michigan_online_education_pers.html

by Mihai Păunescu, EURODL

This article sets to explore the attitudes of higher education students enrolled in a political science programme at Master level towards e-learning facilitated by the introduction of a Moodle platform. The students have been surveyed at the end of public management course in the first semester of the programme asking them to evaluate both the contents (resources) available on the virtual learning environment, as well as the type of activities and the general interaction with technology. The objectives of our survey were twofold: first to carry a thorough evaluation of the course in order to collect evidence for further improvement, but also, more importantly, to unravel the established patterns of students’ learning and their attitudes towards a set of technology facilitated type of learning activities. We conclude that the implementation of a VLE is definitely not likely to immediately change existing learning/teaching practice. It is seen mainly as a support and complementing activity of face-to-face course deliveries, but does not yet change the pedagogical underpinnings of the learning practices. On the other hand, a thorough evaluation of students’ attitudes towards technology-enabled learning is crucial for consistently planning course designs and for embedding a quality culture at course level.

http://www.eurodl.org/?article=554

By Jake New, Chronicle of Higher Ed

Universities and foundations have poured more than $100-million into creating open-education materials. But according to David Wiley, an open-education advocate for 15 years, faculty members and administrators have been slow to use the resources as alternatives to expensive textbooks. Mr. Wiley helped found Lumen Learning, a new company that will offer guidance and support to institutions looking to use those resources. One of the company’s goals is to collaborate with colleges to develop an associate degree in business administration that can be completed entirely with free open-education materials. Lumen is now testing the model with an unnamed community college on the East Coast, and is also looking for colleges interested in applying the model to general-studies and computer-science degrees. Graduating without ever buying a textbook could shave 30 percent off total tuition costs, Mr. Wiley said.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/open-education-company-helps-develop-textbook-free-associate-degree/42847

By Global Times

The trend of learning through open online courses has made its way to China as more of the country’s top universities unveil public courses, and the first cross-university open class for college students in Shanghai kicked off on Tuesday night. The city’s university course-sharing platform formally began registering students from 30 schools in the municipality, and the course “Introduction to Philosophy,” offered by Professor Wang Defeng with Fudan University (FDU), became the first-ever cross-university public course, welcoming 1,072 students Tuesday. Wang’s first lecture was broadcast live online Tuesday. Registered students at other universities could log on to watch it. “It took quite some effort to register for Wang’s class. We call him the Prince of Philosophy,” one student wrote on Weibo. Another student surnamed Zhong, from Shanghai Jiaotong University, told the Global Times that he registered for a course on Western music history offered by the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. In addition to logging on for live classes, students are divided into 40 groups for panel discussions, and guest lecturers will also share their thoughts with the students.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/766326.shtml

By Glynn Cosker, Online Learning Tips

I have been in the workforce for over 20 years and I pride myself on being a lifelong learner both on the job and in the classroom. Recently, I’ve continued along that path by introducing online learning into my busy life. I have a full time job and a family of five with a long list of extra-curricular activities, but in a relatively short period of time I’ve discovered that online education is effective and rewarding. It can be a life changing experience; it was for me. Here are a few things you should know before diving in.

http://onlinelearningtips.com/2013/03/11/keep-out-learning-in-progress/

by MARY ELLEN ELLIS, Teacher Certification Degrees

Virtual courses are becoming increasingly prevalent in educational settings from kindergarten through college. Online education has many advantages including lower costs and, depending on the quality of the course, greater student engagement. Along with the rise in online courses comes greater use of technology. Virtual classes are beginning to implement gaming as a way to engage students and to make the experience of online learning more interactive. Advances in technology have made it much easier to create and build online games, which means that they have proliferated over the last few years. Education has not been left out of this trend and many games are created with learning in mind. Some are free or inexpensive apps, like xGerms Counting, an app created by the company K12 Inc. that helps youngsters practice counting while playing a game.

http://www.teachercertificationdegrees.com/articles/gaming-online-courses-0310131/

by Katie Lepi, Edudemic

In a recent visit (2/26/13) to Charlie Rose, Sal Khan shared some insight into the current state of Khan Academy. According to his interview, the site is now reaching about 6 million students. The Khan Academy team is comprised of 40 people. Khan is no longer the only person making the videos, and he says it’s about “ten times bigger” than when he last spoke to Rose roughly 18 months ago. Khan goes on to discuss the self-paced model and how it is effective for certain learners. He also talks about the problems surrounding passive lectures: “whether you have 10 students in the room, 20 students in the room, or 2,000 students in the room, if you’re having a passive lecture … it doesn’t matter.” He goes on to call the current lecture system as downright “dehumanizing” in this interview. 

http://edudemic.com/2013/03/sal-khan-plans-stats/

by Colleen Lee, Edudemic

I see two camps of technology-involved people in my school. The ‘early adopter’ who is keenly interested in searching out new techniques, programs and options that technology can bring to teaching. I am one of those. I know for many in my school I represent something scary; the fear that because I am trying new things they will be asked to as well. As they call themselves they are the “gee, love to try that, but I don’t have time” crew. Ironically I don’t have ‘time’ either. As with them, I have marking and prepping to do and even a life to lead. I argue though to make the time. Incorporating technology into my teaching allows me to do 3 things I ask my own students to do:

http://startl.org/blog/2013/03/07/massive-open-online-courses-moocs-touted-at-sxswedu/

by Scott Steinberg, Huffington Post

In case you haven’t figured it out already, you need to take everything you know about what school was like when you were a kid and throw it out the window. If the fact that nearly every child these days is individually dropped off and picked up by their parents hasn’t already alerted you to the fact that it’s a different world, well… Let’s just say the growing emergence of schools which have official policies surrounding high-tech concerns like smartphone usage, cyberbullying and social networks should rapidly clue you in that the rules today are different.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-steinberg/technology-for-schools-an_b_2805201.html

Ry Rivard, Inside Higher Ed

California lawmakers detailed a plan Wednesday to require the state’s 145 public colleges and universities to grant credit for low-cost online courses offered by outside groups, including classes offered by for-profit companies.  The bill, backed by the powerful leader of the state’s Senate, would force all the state’s colleges – from community colleges to the University of California at Berkeley – to reduce overcrowding by allowing students to enroll in dozens of outsourced classes. The idea immediately captured attention not just among educators, but among pundits and politicians — and not just in California. The measure’s lead sponsor, Democratic State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, said the bill would reshape higher education and “break the bottleneck that prevents students from completing courses.”

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/14/california-educational-factions-eye-plan-offer-mooc-credit-public-colleges

by Joel D. Freedman, Syracuse.com

Although the National Association of Biology Teachers, the National Science Teachers Association and the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society endorse alternatives to biology lab dissections, cutting up animals is still commonplace at most of our educational institutions. When prepared for dissection, frogs are usually dropped into a water/alcohol solution. It takes up to 20 minutes for them to die. Other animals also experience much suffering before becoming “specimens” for dissection. The chemicals that preserve these animals often irritate students’ eyes, skin and respiratory systems, and are carcinogenic. Alternatives to dissection using computer programs or anatomical models are less expensive and last longer than animal purchases.

http://blog.syracuse.com/opinion/2013/03/schools_should_eliminate_anima.html

by Martin Austermuhle, DCIST

Three men allegedly broke into Brent Elementary School early last Friday, making off with a number of electronic devices before students arrived for a day of classes. Brent, located on North Carolina Avenue, was hit last October and again in November, when two other schools were also the victim of thefts of computers.

The theft of computers and electronic gadgets is a problem that has plagued a number of public schools over the years. According to a Freedom of Information request we filed late last year, at least 230 computers have been stolen from D.C. public schools since 2009. Of those, only 50 have been recovered. According to DCPS, the rise in thefts tracks with the increasing use of technology in classrooms. “The computer thefts are directly tied to an increase in the use of technology—as more schools use iPads, Kindles and laptops in the classrooms, schools become a target for thieves.

http://dcist.com/2013/03/more_computers_stolen_from_dc_publi.php

By BETH GARDINER, NY Times

At 16, Isabelle Aleksander spends hours writing computer code and plans a career in engineering. Her latest passion is the Raspberry Pi, a low-cost, credit-card-size computer developed to help teach programming. But when she told her best friend — “he’s male, also into programming” — his response was not what she had expected. “He was like, ‘Wait, how do you know about them? You’re a girl and you shouldn’t be doing that,”’ Ms. Aleksander said incredulously. She and her friend Honey Ross, 15, are among the few girls at King Alfred School, their private school in North London, with an intense interest in technology. The two, confident and outgoing, say they understand why: computing can seem boring from the outside, populated mainly by nerdy boys. “It’s sad,” Ms. Ross said, chatting between classes in the computer lab. “It’s such an amazing world. It’s kind of waiting for loads of young girls” to jump in.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/technology/computer-coding-its-not-just-for-boys.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

By Todd R. Weiss, eWeek

Twitter is updating its Android and iOS apps to bring faster content delivery for users. Twitter’s Android and iOS apps have received improvements to make them easier to use and quicker at finding content on the popular social media platform. The updates to search and Web browsing are also being added to Twitter’s mobile.twitter.com site, according to a March 6 post by software engineer Nick Takayama on the Twitter Blog. The improvements follow another recent change that allows users to see older Tweets in their search results.

http://www.eweek.com/mobile/twitter-adds-user-enhancements-to-its-mobile-apps/

by Jamia Wilson, TED

After more than 13 years of research convinced him that children have the ability to learn almost anything on their own, 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra aspires to shape the future of learning by building a School in the Cloud, helping kids “tap into their innate sense of wonder.” In the spirit of Mitra’s invitation to the world to “ask kids big questions, and find big answers,” we asked four brilliant young people to tell us: What do you think is the future of learning?

http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/06/4-inspiring-kids-imagine-the-future-of-learning/

by the BBC

Robots confused about what they encounter in the world of humans can now get help online. European scientists have turned on the first part of a web-based database of information to help them cope. Called Rapyuta, the online “brain” describes objects robots have met and can also carry out complicated computation on behalf of a robot. Rapyuta’s creators hope it will make robots cheaper as they will not need all their processing power on-board. The Rapyuta database is part of the European Robo Earth project that began in 2011 with the hope of standardising the way robots perceive the human world.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21714191#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

by Katherine Mangu-Ward, Hit&Run Blog

If a student threatens to shoot his classmates (or himself) on the online message board for his physics class, does that count as a campus threat? That’s just one of the many questions purveyors of massively open online courses, or MOOCs, are asking themselves. Universities have traditionally been asked to play many roles, and as the functions of those universities are disaggregated, the question of who picks up which pieces is a tough one. In truly massive online courses, like those offered by Coursera, Udacity, and huge public universities experimenting with online learning, teachers are not expected to read all the postings in a class message board. But students still act like students—fighting, falling in love, chattering about emotional problems, and generally acting in ways that would be considered inappropriate in other parts of grown up life.

http://reason.com/blog/2013/03/06/what-should-online-courses-do-with-angry

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, NY Times

Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know. And therefore it will not pay for a C+ in chemistry, just because your state college considers that a passing grade and was willing to give you a diploma that says so. We’re moving to a more competency-based world where there will be less interest in how you acquired the competency — in an online course, at a four-year-college or in a company-administered class — and more demand to prove that you mastered the competency…. Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and expert on disruptive innovation, gave a compelling talk about how much today’s traditional university has in common with General Motors of the 1960s, just before Toyota used a technology breakthrough to come from nowhere and topple G.M.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/friedman-the-professors-big-stage.html?_r=0

By Spencer Kilgore, Daily Sundial

President Dianne F. Harrison encouraged faculty members at this year’s faculty retreat to consider the idea of integrating Apple’s iPad and various educational apps, such as iBooks Author, into their classrooms. Two ideas being implemented are The iPad Initiative, an idea presented by Apple to integrate their tablets into a classroom environment, and the Course Redesign institute, a two-week summer program to train CSUN faculty members to restructure their face-to-face classes into an online or hybrid environment. Both ideas are ways the campus can further incorporate technology into an educational environment. Harrison said that iPads can improve student learning outcomes.

http://sundial.csun.edu/2013/03/more-technology-in-classroom-could-affect-students-and-teachers/

By Erin Palmer, US News University Directory

Like many moms, Charlotte Butler wanted to inspire her children by going to school and obtaining her college degree. The difference with Butler is that her two biological sons are 60 and 59 years old, and her foster son is 19. And Butler herself is 80. Butler, a native of Naugatuck, Conn., recently enrolled in classes at Post University Online Institute in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree in human services. Butler, who never previously attended college, said working toward her degree will not only motivate her children, but help her stay sharp. “A smarter America is a stronger America, and people today are not using their brains enough,” Butler said in a news release. “I want to stay active both physically and mentally and age is no obstacle.”

http://www.usnewsuniversitydirectory.com/articles/80-year-old-woman-enrolls-in-online-college_12989.aspx#.UTlL2tabCnI