For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.
Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work.
Recently, my husband received an email from a very casual acquaintance and wondered where this person lived. He Googled them, found their address and was presented, by Google Street view, with a picture of their house, and all within the space of 2 minutes. This exercise caused me to comment to him, “it must be really different dating these days” - we’ve been together 15 years - “it’s so much harder for anyone to lie anymore.”
“I love everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.”
You’ll find Oliver Goldsmith’s words chalked on a coffee-of-the-day board steps away from the Regional Assembly of Text — a small paper emporium that would make Ned Ludd proud. Here co-owners Rebecca Dolen and Brandy Fedoruk, grads of Emily Carr University of Art + Design, stand behind the counter of their store, a wall of cast-off industrial filing cabinets behind, assembling cards and packages with meticulous care.
It’s a question that’s bothered cultural critics for decades: while we know more than ever, are we getting dumber as a result of the increasing amount of technology at our disposal? Reading historical debates, and hearing of the attention paid to them by a thoughtful populace, certainly makes one wonder. Speaking in the 1820s of the mechanical Difference Engine he had devised for computing polynomial functions, Charles Babbage, the father of the programmable computer and our web-log’s namesake, told the House of Commons:
“On two occasions I have been asked [by Members of Parliament], “Pray, Mr Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
Remember that $35 tablet out of India we told you about last month? If you want to see the much-talked-about prototype in moving color, a gadget show on Indian television just featured an exclusive hands-on that could help dissipate some of the skepticism about the device.
“Everybody actually said, ‘It cannot happen, a $35 tablet,’ and not only does it exist, it works and it works brilliantly,” said Rajiv Makhni, co-host of the show “Gadget Guru,” who took the computer through its paces with show cohort Vikram Chandra and then talked all aspects of the gadget with Kapil Sibal, the country’s Minister for Human Resource Development and the same guy who officially unveiled the super-cheap touch-screen device. Aimed at the country’s students, it’s being called India’s answer to Nicholas Negroponte’s famed OLPC laptop.
To help spur interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, many schools have begun to integrate robotics into the curriculum—but are younger students and their teachers ready for a new wave of robotic teaching assistants?
Many researchers and robotics experts agree that robot teachers are no longer the stuff of science fiction—they’re part of a new workforce designed to lend a helping hand to classroom teachers … whose jobs aren’t in jeopardy any time soon, experts say.
Student response system (SRS) technology has caught on in classrooms nationwide as a tool for boosting class participation, as well as helping teachers ensure that students understand what’s being taught before they move on to another concept. But the current generation of the technology has its limitations.
For one thing, the lag time between student responses kills the pace of learning, says Promethean Director Tony Cann. In a typical use of the technology, the teacher poses a question to the entire class, then pauses as students answer the question on their personal “clicker” devices. This results in a lot of waiting around—time that could be put to better use.
The vast majority of medical school students believe that technology in the form of virtual reality exercises could help them to develop the skills they will need as future doctors, a new survey reveals.
The survey of 200 medical students from the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison found nearly all (98 percent) believing the technology to be a definite aid to higher learning.
“Due in large part to their high degree of technological literacy, today’s medical students are a radically different audience than the students of 15 to 20 years ago,” study co-author Dr. Frederick W. Kron, a former assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Wisconsin and current president of Medical Cyberworlds, Inc., said in a University of Michigan news release.
School is starting in late August and already a few universities are touting their decision to make the iPad a part of the classroom, as an important tool in teaching.
Institutions such as George Fox University and Seton Hill University will give students an iPad to use this fall semester, according to Wired, in a bid to test the device at the university level — all in the name of cutting-edge technology.
Two researchers at Duke University have published a draft study that raises questions about the academic value of giving students home computers and broadband internet access. Their study has led to a flurry of media coverage, with some reports trumpeting the study’s findings as evidence that efforts to close the digital divide are counterproductive. But is that what their research really says?
More than 29,000 K-12 students attend school online in Ohio, about five times more than did seven years ago.
They log into their computers from home without ever stepping into a classroom.
Some are in kindergarten.
Doug and Linda Sellers of Beavercreek took the virtual leap from the traditional bricks-and-mortar public schools when they enrolled their four children in an e-school three years ago. The couple said it was a difficult decision and a tough sell to relatives, many of whom are teachers.
Miami-Dade Public Schools is tightening its embrace with the 21st century by unveiling the newest addition to its magnet school fleet — the iPrep Academy.
Set to open this fall, iPrep Academy is in the district’s administration building at 1500 Biscayne Blvd. “in the heart of Miami’s business, cultural and economic landscape,” according to the school’s website.
“Geographically, it is near businesses and government organizations,” said Albert Pimienta, an administrator with the district’s Instructional Technology Department, which has been working on plans for the school. “But part of the curriculum is also an internship with a local business or government branch. Part of the students’ typical school day will be internship.”
Caroline Haythornthwaite (PhD, Toronto, 1996) is newly appointed Director, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia. She joins UBC in August, 2010 after 14 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. In 2009-10, she was Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education, University of London presenting and writing on ‘Learning Networks’, and in summer 2009 she was a visiting researcher at the Brazilian Institute for Information in Science and Technology (IBICT), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has an international reputation in research on information and knowledge sharing through social networks, and the impact of computer media and the Internet on work, learning and social interaction. Her studies have examined social networks of work and media use, the development and nature of community online, distributed knowledge processes, the nature and constraints of interdisciplinary collaboration, and the transformative effects of the Internet and web 2.0 technologies on learning and collaborative practices. Recent work has concentrated on addressing e-learning as a socio-technical implementation for education, and also as a general, emerging practice of online, informal learning. Major publications include ‘The Internet in Everyday Life’ (2002, with Barry Wellman); ‘Learning, Culture and Community in Online Education’ (2004, with Michelle M. Kazmer), ‘The Handbook of E-learning Research’ (2007, with Richard Andrews), and ‘E-learning Research and Practice’ (2011, with Richard Andrews).
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For many educators who are veterans of past education technology conferences, the name Alan November should be familiar. A senior partner of November Learning, a consulting firm that helps school systems redesign teaching and learning for the digital age, November has spoken at numerous ed-tech shows. But readers might not know that he became an educator “by accident,” as he says.
Trained as a city planner, November’s first client after college was a reform school for boys on an island in Boston Harbor that had burned to the ground. He was asked if he’d like to teach algebra and oceanography when one of the teachers quit, and that was when he discovered that he loved teaching—and also that the current education system didn’t meet the needs of every student.
The message from the 14-year-old Tunisian skateboarder was curt. “Totally wrong,” he said of my French. My conjugation was off and I should study spelling. On a scale of one to five, he said, my French practice essay was worth a one. Then he disappeared into the anonymity of the Internet.
If there is any truth to the old Russian proverb that enemies parrot yes while friends say no, then it is easy to form fast friendships on Livemocha.com, a Web site devoted to helping people learn languages by swapping messages over the Internet and then correcting each other’s messages.
By Morgan Meis, in The Smart Set from Drexel University
Tom Bissell is a David Foster Wallace man. I mean that specifically. DFW’s essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again contains “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” In that essay, Wallace wrote these momentous sentences:
Most scholars and critics who write about U.S. popular culture … seem both to take TV seriously and to suffer real pain over what they see. There’s this well-known critical litany about television’s vapidity, shallowness, and irrealism. The litany is often far cruder and triter than what the critics complain about, which I think is why most younger viewers find pro criticism of television far less interesting than pro television itself.
Review 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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?
by 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.
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).
In the late 1980s, Apple Computer was better known for fantasizing about breakthrough products than making them. Most famously, CEO John Sculley envisioned a futuristic gizmo called the Knowledge Navigator–featuring a bowtied digital assistant–in his 1987 book Odyssey. It made for a mighty impressive futuristic video.
In September of the same year, Apple announced a competition it called “Project 2000.” Teams from a dozen universities were invited to submit papers about Knowledge Navigator-like concepts representing the PC of far-off 2000. An impressive panel of judges–Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, personal-computing visionary Alan Kay, futurist Alvin Toffler, science fiction legend Ray Bradbury, and Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Diane Ravitch–judged the entries in early 1988.
Hello, my name is Sarah Firisen and I am a software developer and a writer. But wait, my name is also Bianca Zanetti and I used to be a fashion designer with a string of stores. No, I am not schizophrenic, I am Sarah in my real life and Bianca in my Second Life. My Second Life has not been so active in recent months, but in my virtual heyday I went to parties, art gallery openings and weddings.
My husband, in real and virtual life, was very active in the “ROMA (SPQR)” world, owned a beautiful Roman villa that I built for him, and was even a Roman Senator for one term. During our virtual travels we made many friends and a few enemies. We met some really crazy people and some really great ones. Some of those friendships even carried over into our real lives and in one case we spent a lovely evening in the real Rome with the real life representation of one of our avatar friends.
As an innovative educator I often write about fantastic tools that teachers can incorporate into practice. But, what might a 21st century high school literacy class look like? Here is a glimpse into a class I would love to be in if I was a student today.
Background:
Sam is a eleventh grader, who has struggled with ELA courses in secondary school. He is accustomed to the cycle of failure after years of low and barely passing grades in elementary school and repeating eighth grade before being allowed to continue on to high school. Although eager to learn and eventually finish high school, Sam has already failed two quarters of English.
By Steven Anderson, in Digital Learning Environments
Students today depend upon paper too much. They don’t know how to write on slate without chalk dust all over themselves. They can’t clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of paper?”
This was a quote that appeared in a principals magazine in 1815. But I wonder? Is this the same sentiment that our educators have today?
Unfortunately, there are teachers and administrators out there that still believe that the advancement of and use of technology in the classroom is detrimental to learning. Just last week, Anthony Orsini, an Administrator in a New Jersey middle school, sent home a letter that strongly encouraged the parents to get their students out of all social media sites saying, ‘Let me repeat that - there is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! None.’
Today the International Conference on Ubiquitous Learning Newsletter will be relaunched - marking the start of a new approach to connecting with and reaching out to our Ubiquitous Learning Community. The Ubiquitous Learning Newsletter will be sent out on a monthly basis and will contain important community news, conference updates, and publication information.
It is the hope of Common Ground Publishing that this newsletter will provide you with a more positive experience connecting with the Ubiquitous Learning Community.
If you are not currently a subscriber but would like to receive future newsletter emails, please go to http://www.ubi-learn.com and click on “Sign Up: Our Newsletter” in the upper right-hand corner.
If you have inquiries, concerns, or general comments, please feel free to contact the newsletter team at support@ubi-learn.com
The 2010 Ubiquitous Learning Conference will take place at the UBC’s Robson Square in downtown Vancouver, Canada from December 10-11, 2010. For more information please visit www.ULConference.com
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2010 Ubiquitous Learning Conference, see: our registration page.
Play a computer game, boost your IQ—that’s the claim made by some software companies peddling so-called brain-training programs. It’s probably an empty promise, according to the largest study to date of brain-training software, which finds no evidence of general cognitive benefits. Yet the study’s limitations give brain-training advocates plenty to gripe about.
The idea for the study originated with a BBC science television show, Bang Goes the Theory. Producers contacted Adrian Owen at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, U.K., to help design an experiment to test the efficacy of computer brain training. Many of these programs are set up like a game, and playing along supposedly boosts memory, attention, and other cognitive functions. But few rigorous studies have been conducted on them, and many researchers question whether even the best programs do anything more than make people better at the game itself.
“By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world”
-President Barack Obama,
Address to Congress, February 24, 2009
VAIL, Ariz. — Students endure hundreds of hours on yellow buses each year getting to and from school in this desert exurb of Tucson, and stir-crazy teenagers break the monotony by teasing, texting, flirting, shouting, climbing (over seats) and sometimes punching (seats or seatmates).
But on this chilly morning, as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops.
From Andrew Flanagin in Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning
Select findings from a new study by Andrew J. Flanagin, Professor in the Department of Communication, and Miriam Metzger, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of California, Santa Barbara.
The results are based on a web-based survey of a representative sample of 2,747 children (age 11 to 18) with internet access in the United States, and one parent of each child.
The full report will be available in early 2010 as part of the MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning, published by MIT Press.
Read Spotlight’s interview with Flanagin about the findings. Below are some of the study’s highlights:
Most kids begin using the internet between Grades 2 and 6.
Nearly all kids surveyed (97%) are online by eighth grade.
Facebook just “updated” its privacy settings, and I almost did not notice. That’s because I’m (Facebook founder) Mark Zuckerberg’s nightmare: I don’t “share” anything on Facebook to begin with, so my Facebook profile contains little to be private about.
But some of those who do share things on Facebook “came close to killing [their] account this week”, as Danny Sullivan did, when they paid attention to the details of the change.
A year ago I predicted in our (The Economist’s) sister publication, The World in 2009, that this brave new culture of “sharing” would cause discontent. Maybe that point is now nigh. For me personally, it arrived long ago.
Because I used to cover the internet in my previous beat at The Economist, I had to be one of the first to try new things like Facebook, and I usually was. But from the start I made a pact with myself:
No pictures of, or (indexable, Googlable) information about, my loved ones.
No names, birthdays, diaper photos etc.
No drive-by shootings (photo, video, status update) of third parties
In particular, my wife and children should, in effect, not be on the internet at all unless they themselves later choose to put themselves there. You may have noticed that their names do not appear on The Hannibal Blog, even though I share my ideas here quite liberally. Yes, you may know me very intimately by now in an intellectual way–as I feel I know some of you quite intimately through your comments even though I only see your pseudonym and avatar. But you do not know me biographically beyond what I choose to divulge. I practice Platonic sharing.
By Patricia Cohen, in The New York Times
From Sarah Firisen, in 3 Quarks Daily
By Christina Crook, in Curator
In The Economist
By Leslie Katz, from Cnet News
By Meris Stansbury, in eSchool News
From eSchool News
By Dianne de Guzman, in San Francisco Chronicle
By Meris Stansbury, from eSchool News
From eSchool News
By Morgan Meis, in The Smart Set from Drexel University
Review by Chris Suellentrop, in The New York Times
by Sue Halpern, in The New York Review of Books
by Stephanie Clifford and Stephanie Rosenbloom, in The New York Times
A review from Chris Dede of Ubiquitous Learning, a volume edited by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis
By Harry McCracken, in Technologizer
By Sarah Firisen, in 3 Quarks Daily
Location and Date:
By Greg Miller, in Science
VAIL, Ariz. — Students endure hundreds of hours on yellow buses each year getting to and from school in this desert exurb of Tucson, and stir-crazy teenagers break the monotony by teasing, texting, flirting, shouting, climbing (over seats) and sometimes punching (seats or seatmates).
Select findings from a new study by Andrew J. Flanagin, Professor in the Department of Communication, and Miriam Metzger, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Facebook just “updated” its privacy settings, and I almost did not notice. That’s because I’m (Facebook founder) Mark Zuckerberg’s nightmare: I don’t “share” anything on Facebook to begin with, so my Facebook profile contains little to be private about.