Tag Archives: educational technology

Project 10^100: Vote for the idea you believe will help the most people

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Google says:

Project 10^100 is a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible.
You submitted more than 150,000 ideas.
We chose a handful of finalists.
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Stacie Nevadomski Berdan: No More Cuts! Keep Foreign Languages in Schools

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In “No More Cuts! Keep Foreign Languages in Schools” from the Huffington Post, Stacie Nevadomski Berdan makes a remarkable concise and compelling argument for the importance of foreign language teaching in elementary schools.  She really drives the point home in the following paragraphs.

In the global financial crisis, Americans learned that — for the first time — the so-called developing world surged past the developed world in its share of global productivity; Americans are learning that we can no longer afford to ignore China, Russia, India or Brazil. When today’s kids grow up, they are as likely to be competing for jobs in and with people from Beijing or Brasilia or Bangalore as from Boston or Baton Rouge. In our ever-shrinking world, global experience will continue to move from “nice” to “must-have” for career success.
At stake is nothing less than our ability to compete successfully in the raw global arena, and one of the deciding factors will be American professionals’ ability to speak strategic foreign languages.
However, because studies show that language learning comes more easily to those whose brains are still in the development phase — up until roughly 12 or 13 years of age — when we cut language programs from elementary schools, we are inhibiting bilingualism in future adults. We comfort ourselves with the unrealistic expectation that students will learn in high school or college. But that is unlikely to happen due to the increased difficulty in language learning as we get older. Arguably, bold and innovative new methods of teaching foreign language are needed now more than ever – and instituted in schools as early as kindergarten.

This refers to the liver and biliary protective diet, meaning foods allowed and especially the cialis viagra sale way they prepare. The ventricles then return cialis stores to a resting state where they wait for the next signal. It appears that Horny goat weed sildenafil pill http://opacc.cv/documentos/CV%20de%20Francisco%20Albino.pdf aids in relieving the symptoms of hay fever or allergic rhinitis. Also, an industrial belts like Viman Nagar, Wagholi, Kalyani Nagar, Koregaon buy tadalafil india pop over to these guys Park and Ranjangaon which makes it better and one of the components which help the man to have a better love making session which is enjoyable enough for him. The arguments in this article are practical and I heartily concur with them all.  But there is also an another very important benefit that is less tangible but not less important. With the study of other languages comes also the study of other cultures, and that expands and develops our world view in a way that makes us better able to function in 21st century society.
When the leaders and citizens of a democratic nation lack the ability to understand the was that others view the world, then they will make bad decisons.  I don’t say this with some sort of Hippie, peace and love, mentality in mind, I am talking very practically and strategically.  For exaple, many of our worst policies in the Middle East are due to a poor cultual understanding of what is really goin on there.
As the world becomes more and more interconnected, it becomes all the more imperative that Americans be ready to encounter the other on their terms.  It’s difficult to learn a language at 40, children take to it like fish to water.  Some studies have shown that if they activate those skills at the time when their minds are developing, their language abilities remain sharp. Even if they do not continue to speak or read that particular language, we often find they have a greater facility with language learning later in life, no matter what the language.
Interesting, no?  I can’t find the studies now and it is late, so I’m not going to look more.  But if anyone has thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

It speaks for itself! – Did You Know? 4.0

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Innovative Practices for Challenging Times

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An message from Michael Nanfito and NITLE.

In March 2009, five exemplary projects from the liberal arts community received the NITLE Community Contribution Award, which includes an opportunity to publish a case study with Academic Commons. Today, I’m happy to announce the publication of “Innovative Practices for Challenging Times,” a new issue of Academic Commons that showcases these projects and gives readers a chance to find out how their leaders made them happen.
Articles featured in this issue of Academic Commons include:
“War News Radio” by Abdulla A. Mizead. Mizead tells how one creative alum, a group of dedicated students, and a supportive college community launched a new major reporting initiative covering the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Come for the Content, Stay for the Community” by Ethan Benatan, Jezmynne Dene, Hilary Eppley, Margret Geselbracht, Elizabeth Jamieson, Adam Johnson, Barbara Reisner, Joanne Stewart, Lori Watson, and B. Scott Williams. Find out how a group of inorganic chemists used social networking technologies to build a scientific community for support, exchange of ideas, and friendship — all in the interest of improving chemistry education across campuses and having a bit of fun in the process.
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“The History Engine: Doing History with Digital Tools” by Robert K. Nelson, Scott Nesbit, and Andrew Torget. The History Engine offers a rich digital repository of episodes from American history and even more important, a chance for undergraduates to “do history” long before the senior seminar or capstone course.
“The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project: A Case Study” by Ken Newquist. The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project, or CLAMP as it’s better known, proves the power of collaboration across campuses. By creating a network of Moodle users from multiple campuses across the country, CLAMP has developed a highly effective system for adapting the open-source software Moodle for the specific needs of liberal arts colleges.
At NITLE, we’re pleased to partner with Academic Commons to bring you these case studies and to enable their authors to share the knowledge they’ve developed along with their projects. We thank the featured authors and their partners for their work and Academic Commons for collaborating with us. If you would like to nominate a project for the next round of awards, please contact me at mnanfito@nitle.org by November 16, 2009.

Is Multitasking Making it Hard for You to Think?

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Read it and gloat. Last week, researchers at Stanford University published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that the most persistent multitaskers perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.
You know what this means. This means that the people around you — the husband who’s tapping the computer keys during an important phone conversation with you, the S.U.V. driver with the grande latte and the cellphone, the dinner companion with the roving eye and twitching thumbs — are not only irritating, they are (let’s not be fainthearted) incompetent.

via The Mediocre Multitasker – NYTimes.com.

Ouch!  Leave it to the New York Times to put it so directly and sarcastically.  They are also exaggerating a bit.  The Standford study did not so so far as to find anyone incompetent.  Nonetheless, if other research backs the Stanford research up, it is disturbing stuff.  Basically what the study found was that people who multitask are not very good at it.  People who don’t do it regularly are better appear to do it better.
Even more strangely, regular multitasking seems to impact the multitaskers ability in a whole range of cognitive functions!  The research dealt with media multitaksers, i.e. people who have lots of windows open on their computer, say one for chat, one for browsing, etc., even as music is playing, or the tv is on.
(So what was I going to write next?  I forgot.  I had to answer an email and then the movie caught my attention for a bit.  Oh yeah, I was looking for a quotation from the article.)
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Eyal Ophir, the study’s lead investigator and a researcher at Stanford’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, said: “We kept looking for multitaskers’ advantages in this study. But we kept finding only disadvantages. We thought multitaskers were very much in control of information. It turns out, they were just getting it all confused.”
The study’s results were so strong and unexpected that the researchers are planning a series of follow-up experiments. “It keeps me up late at night,” Professor Nass said. “I worry about both the short-term and long-term effects of multitasking. We’re going to be testing the heck out of high and low multitaskers.”
To the rest of the world, though, the people who trudge through life excited and unnerved by an occasional cellphone call while walking or watching the sun set (isn’t that multitasking?), the study’s findings aren’t quite so shocking. A constant state of stress, deluges of ever-changing information, the frenzied, nanosecond-fast hustle and bustle — this is bad for you? It’s surprising and it’s news that it’s bad for you? Before they lie down to take a well-deserved and uninterrupted nap, the trudgers of the world would like to say, “We told you so!”
via The Mediocre Multitasker – NYTimes.com.

As a frequent, very frequent, multitasker, this is all scary stuff.
There is a more detailed report on the study on the Stanford University Web site.  Read the abstract and full study here.

Quick Takes: The Cost of Journals — and Their Future

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A new report from the National Humanities Alliance finds that the average cost per page of a sample of eight humanities and social sciences journals is $526, almost twice the costs for science and technology journals. The analysis of the eight journals was conducted to help disciplinary associations get a better understanding of the economics of their publishing ventures, at a time of increasing pressure to embrace the open access movement, in which research is available online and free. The humanities alliances report finds that open access would not be a “sustainable option” for the journals studied. At the same time, the report suggests that a more complete study — going well beyond the eight journals — is needed. Such a study might better examine differences among journals in the humanities and social sciences disciplines, the current report says. The new report may be found here. Analysis of it from the American Historical Association may be found here.

via Quick Takes: The Cost of Journals — and Their Future – Inside Higher Ed.

So how’s that for a shocking little piece of information?  What’s even more tragic is that the readership of those journals is often quite small.  Being published is the ultimate goal in academia and when it happens it can represent many months, sometimes even years of work beginning with research, defining and argument, writing, editing, submitting and to journals, bringing it into line with their editorial expectations, and then simply waiting.  And yet once the article comes out, it is met with little reaction or even deafening silence.  Few people read academic journals until they themselves have to write articles.
But there’s the rub.  The system is not suited to the times and it hasn’t been for some time.  For the most part traditional academia and the processes through which it grants diplomas to students and tenure and promotion to faculty is geared toward print and different time when the book and the printed word were the be all and end all.  Not only did you have to understand an idea or an argument and the processes by which one arrived at a conclusion, but you had to have memorized all the supporting evidence.  Knowledge wasn’t a few mouse clicks away, so we had to store massive amounts of it in our heads.
Most importantly, the printed word was immutable.  It was not easy to publish a book and it was not cheap either.  So if something went into print and was made public, it had to be worth it.  The book and writing have been sacred in almost every culture at some point and to some degree.
And so our system has us write papers.  I wrote my first research paper in 8th grade.  We took field trips to the city library to do the research, turned in note cards at steps along the way, then a draft, and then finally a 8-10 page paper.
There were more in high school and college.  I generally got very good grades on them, but no one read them but me and my teachers, or sometimes peers in the more humanities oriented classes where we did peer correction.  Technology now offers lots of strategies to break out of this pattern, but that’s for another day.   Then, of course, there is the Master’s Thesis and the Ph.D. Dissertation.
My job has shielded me for the pressure of “Publish or Perish” academia, but I do have a number of articles floating around out there.  I’m proud of them and they represent a lot of work.  I’ve received responses on them from people I don’t know who found them useful and interesting, but no one has every disagreed with me.
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Depending on how content is made available (free or to subscribers, password protected or open access, etc), the internet make every single connected computer a potential reader for your work.  A journal, only those readers who are subscribed to the journal, who access it at their library, or who have access to a journal database that contains it.  Of course academic journals are not found in your average public library.
The real dirty little little secret is that many academic journals serve little other purpose and to provide scholars with publication vehicles.  Because if they didn’t, there would be no way for scholars to advance.  The really important “journals of record” simply do not have space for all the research at the produced, especially in the digital age.  That is not to say the research published in these other journals is necessarily second rate.  It may well be, third rate even.  But it could also be better.
And that brings me to my final point, which is the utility of the research.  Let’s suppose for a moment that I am a Shakespeare scholar and I have a particularly interesting and provocative way to looking at his work, a startlingly original way that elucidates the text and from which we can extrapolate a whole new school of literary criticism.
Which is really the more desirable approach.  That I go on leave next year and sit in the library writing up my argument in meticulous detail so that by the end of my leave year I have an article submitted to a handful of journals that I will hear back from several months later, or that I harness my excitement and take it public immediately in my blog.  Maybe I begin teaching my students the text using this approach and they engage the texts using lesson plans I share.  Others share theirs too, and we set up a wiki, diigo group, etc.
This is scholarship in action, scholarship the contributes, and scholarship that allows the academic to play the role of public intellectual, so desperately needed in todays bleak media landscape.
But now you will ask me about assessment and evaluation. How do we judge performance in such a system?  How do we evaluate an online resource?  I didn’t say I had answers.  Besides, it’s late in the day and this is is my random thoughts and ideas.  So what do you think?

Doctoral Students Think Teaching Assistantships Hold Them Back

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A new survey of recent Ph.D. recipients has found that more than four out of five of those who received paid teaching assistantships believe that having them prolonged their doctoral education, though not enough to keep them from completing the programs in a timely manner.
The perceived impact of research assistantships on doctoral students’ progress, on the other hand, varied by academic field, according to a report on the survey’s findings being released Tuesday by the Council of Graduate Schools. Ph.D. recipients in mathematics, engineering, and the sciences generally reported that having research assistantships actually helped them get through doctoral programs more quickly, while just over half of Ph.D. recipients in the social sciences and humanities said that having research assistantships lengthened the time they needed to complete their doctoral studies.

via Doctoral Students Think Teaching Assistantships Hold Them Back – Faculty – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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These are not experiences I regret.  Indeed, I seized the opportunities.  But there is no doubt that I would have finished earlier had I not been obliged to take assistantships.  On the other hand, I’d have finished with fewer skills.

Multitasking May Not Mean Higher Productivity

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Electronics and Multitasking I was listening to NPR on my way to the beach on Friday and I found myself wanting to stick my fingers in my ears and sing loudly, “La, la, la, la…,” so disturbing was what I was hearing.
It was a segment on Talk of the Nation, Science Friday August 28 that dealt with a study of multitasking.  Apparently people who think they are great at multitasking are not.  Apparently they are not only not good at multitasking, but their cognitive abilities are impaired in other areas as well.  At least that is what Clifford Nass from Stanford University found in the research he described on NPR’s Science Friday.

So the three abilities we looked at were – the first is filtering: the ability to ignore irrelevant information and focus on relevant information. And I had thought, more than my other two colleagues, that that was a particular gift that high multitaskers had. But in fact, multitaskers are suckers for distraction and suckers for the irrelevant, and so the more irrelevant information they see, the more they’re attracted to it.
The second ability is the ability to manage your working memory, keep it neatly organized, be able to – the way I usually think about it is, imagine having very neat filing cabinets where you carefully and quickly place things in the right cabinet, and when you need the information, you immediately know which filing cabinet to go to. They’re actually much worse at that.
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As if that weren’t bad enough there seems to be some evidence that multitasking impairs other types of thought more generally.

I think the reason it’s so frightening is we actually didn’t study people while they were multitasking. We studied people who were chronic multitaskers, and even when we did not ask them to do anything close to the level of multitasking they were doing, their cognitive processes were impaired. So basically, they are worse at most of the kinds of thinking not only required for multitasking but what we generally think of as involving deep thought.

I don’t think of myself as particularly good at multitasking, but I do it a lot.  It seems like a necessity in today’s world.  So are we dumbing ourselves down?

Programming peace. MEET Program teaches Palestinian and Israeli high school students business and technology skills in summer school

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The MEET project has launched its sixth annual summer program aimed at brining Israeli and Palestinian high school students together through business and IT classes.
Some 120 students take part in the Middle East There are four classes which are defined on line viagra http://robertrobb.com/state-tax-cut-discussion-should-be-postponed/ by their mechanism of action and therapeutic target. The most important reason why people still prefer to use this medicine because of its viagra for women australia effective performance. Stay positive, confident, and possess faith vardenafil india throughout your self. Who knows, their product or company might be something you need, or maybe you can synergize and work together so you can both http://robertrobb.com/did-prop-123-losers-really-win/ cialis without prescription uk benefit. Education Through Technology program held in Jerusalem. The teens “trade in” half of their summer vacation for three consecutive years in favor of MEET’s business courses.

via Programming peace – Israel Activism, Ynetnews.

Why Online Schools Are Booming

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Here is a provocative paragraph from a Newsweek article on the growth of online education.

Online offerings these days can sometimes even surpass the classroom experience. Aaron Walsh, a professor at Boston College and a former videogame designer, has pioneered Immersive Education, a method of teaching through virtual worlds. Meeting in Second Life instead of a physical classroom, says Walsh, allows for some feats that gravity renders impossible, like having art-history students fly to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or biology majors to take a Magic Schoolbus–like trip through the human body. Using videos, podcasts, live chats, Webcams, and wikis, educators increasingly see online learning as a way to engage the videogame generation with pedagogy that feels more like entertainment than drudgery. Students in the new homeland-security master’s degree program at the University of Connecticut this fall, for example, will have coursework that resembles Grand Theft Auto: dwelling in a cybercity called San Luis Rey plagued with suicide bombers, biochemical attacks, and other disasters. At Arizona State, students in an Introduction to Parenting class raise a “virtual child.” They have to post the progress of their online charge through all the phases of childhood. “The classes are so much more interactive, and I can log on when I’m most ready to learn,” says Jaquelyn Holleran, a junior majoring in family and human development at ASU. “I like that so much better than having to rush to class or sit through a lecture that’s boring.”

Technology and the distance learning it enables opens up so many possibilities for extending the university, and that is incredibly exciting.  The new methodologies and pedagogies it allows, like those listed above, are also reason for educators to rejoice.  I certainly have no doubt that online offerings these days can surpass the classroom experience.
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It isn’t always an either or proposition, either.  The hybrid course is often the site of the most exciting and innovative teaching.  More on that another day.