Monthly Archive for June, 2010

Ubiquitous Learning Journal Submissions Now Open

Published on June 30, 2010 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

ubiquitous_front1Want to get your 2011 publications underway now?

We are accepting submissions for the next volume of Ubiquitous Learning: An International Journal. The upcoming submission deadline is Monday 2 August 2010.

Ubiquitous Learning: An International Journal sets out to define an emerging field. Ubiquitous learning is a new educational paradigm made possible in part by the affordances of digital media.

Ubiquitous Learning is a counterpart to the concept ‘ubiquitous computing’, but one which seeks to put the needs and dynamics of learning ahead of the technologies that may support learning. The arrival of new technologies does not mean that learning has to change. Learning should only change for learning’s sake. The key perspective of the conference and journal is that our changing learning needs can be served by ubiquitous computing. In this spirit, the journal investigates the affordances for learning in the digital media, in school and throughout everyday life.

Refereeing of submitted papers will commence shortly so start the submission process early by submitting your proposal.

Paper submission guidelines are available online.

Inside the Box

Published on June 26, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

suellentrop-popupReview by Chris Suellentrop, in The New York Times

Video games have created what must be the biggest generation gap since rock ’n’ roll. Sure, a generational rift of sorts emerged when the World Wide Web showed up near the end of the last century, but in the case of the Web, the older cohort admired and tried to emulate the younger crowd, rather than looking down on them with befuddlement or disdain. With games, a more traditional “Get off my lawn” panic has reared its head.

Take Roger Ebert, one of the most outspoken voices on the fogy side of this divide. In April, Ebert enraged a good portion of the Internet with a post titled “Video Games Can Never Be Art” on his Chicago Sun-Times blog. (To which one games blogger offered the rejoinder “Art Can Never Be Video Games.”) Acknowledging that “never” is a “long, long time,” Ebert wrote, “Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”

To read more…

Some Educators Question if Whiteboards, Other High-tech Tools Raise Achievement

Published on June 24, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

ubipostBy Stephanie McCrummen, in The Washington Post

Under enormous pressure to reform, the nation’s public schools are spending millions of dollars each year on gadgets from text-messaging devices to interactive whiteboards that technology companies promise can raise student performance.

Driving the boom is a surge in federal funding for such products, the industry’s aggressive marketing and an idea axiomatic in the world of education reform: that to prepare students kids for the 21st century, schools must embrace the technologies that are the media of modern life.

To read more…

Ubiquitous Learning Journal Associate Editors

Published on June 23, 2010 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

ubiquitous_front

The Associate Editors listing for Volume 2 of  Ubiquitous Learning: An International Journal is now available.

We would like to thank all of the associate editors as they are an essential part of the publication process providing assessment, comments, critical and constructive feedback and guidance to the authors of submitted papers.

Sharing Liberally

Published on June 22, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

Reviewed by Evgeny Morozov, in Boston Review

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
Clay Shirky
The Penguin Press, $25.95 (Hardcover)

Internet enthusiasts come in two flavors: utopians and populists. The rhetoric of both camps is revolutionary, but the revolutions are different.

Utopians believe that the Internet provides promising new solutions to our most intractable problems. With enough tweets, all global bugs—war, poverty, illiteracy, fascism—can be quashed.

Populists promise no such lofty goals. They see the profound social confusion sown by the Internet as a historic opportunity to snatch power from elites and their institutions and redistribute it more evenly among netizens, the ordinary citizens who have been empowered by the Internet.

To read more…


Mind Over Mass Media

Published on June 20, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

By Steven Pinker, in The New York Times

New forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.

So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans.

But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously.

To read more…

What the iPad Can’t Do

Published on June 13, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

dfw-delillo-book_jpg_470x550_q85by Sue Halpern, in The New York Review of Books

Not long after the iPad went on sale in early April, the Ilinois Institute of Technology announced that it would be providing each member of next fall’s freshman class with one of the new Apple devices. School officials said that the iPad would allow students to take notes, check email, and read books. Which books they had in mind is not precisely clear except for this: they are not likely to be textbooks. While a number of publishers, like McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin, have signed on with software developer ScrollMotion to produce textbooks for the iPad—works that would exploit its multimedia capabilities with video lectures, historical film clips, educational games, and interactive quizzes—almost none of those books yet exist. Students hoping to lighten their load (physical or monetary) by trading heavy, expensive textbooks for the 1.5 pound iPad will be disappointed, as early adopters of new technology often are. Pricing, already an issue for commercial books, is likely going to be even more controversial when it comes to textbooks. Will a new, improved, ebook version of “Atlas of Human Anatomy”cost the same as than the bell-less and whistle-less $149 paper edition? How much will students pay to have fun and exciting and clever textbooks that don’t actually exist in the material world?

To read more…

Wal-Mart to Offer Its Workers a College Program

Published on June 11, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

06walmart1-articleinlineby Stephanie Clifford and Stephanie Rosenbloom, in The New York Times

Fayatteville, Ark – Now on sale at Wal- Mart: college degrees for its employees.

The purveyor of inexpensive jeans and lawnmowers is dipping its toe into the online-education waters, working with a Web-based university to offer its employees in the United States affordable college degrees.

The partnership with American Public University, a for-profit school with about 70,000 online students, will allow some Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club employees to earn credits in areas like retail management and logistics for performing their regular jobs.

To read more…

Ubiquitous Learning

Published on June 9, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

11i50hc27xl_sl500_aa300_A review from Chris Dede of Ubiquitous Learning, a volume edited by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis

Modern day conceptions of ubiquitous learning build on an influential vision of ubiquitous computing published two decades earlier by Mark Weiser (1991) of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. His article depicted a world of smart objects and intelligent contexts based on ubiquitous computing, a different way of conceptualizing the interface between computers, networks, and people. In Weiser’s vision, tiny computers are embedded into nearly every artifact and setting, networked so that they intercommunicate. For example, a tree could be tagged with information about its botanical characteristics; the tree might also offer to show an historic image of its context about the time it was planted or to describe the contribution it makes to reducing local pollution and greenhouse gases. People who wandered by could access this information on a wireless mobile device; based on a person’s response, the building adjacent to the tree might then offer some information. Current images of smart objects and intelligent contexts for learning include affordances not available twenty years earlier, such as Web 2.0 tools embedded in cyberinfrastructure (Dede, 2007) and augmented reality games (Klopfer, 2008).

To read more…