Academic Computing Blog

Steve Gilbert’s “Teaching Learning and Technology Group“, March 31, 2005 newsletter adds Jeff Sommers (Professor of English and Director for the Center for Teaching and Learning at Miami University Middletown) “personal podcasting” to the collection of low threshold applications (LTA):

” One of the most important interactions with students for professors who assign writing in their courses is the response we provide students. While most professors rely upon written comments in the margins and at the end of the student paper and others prefer to hold one-on-one conferences with their students, another approach is to provide digitized recordings for students.

“In five minutes of recorded response, a professor can supply the equivalent of 2.5 pages of double-spaced typewritten commentary. Thus, the recorded response can be more expansive, more detailed, and more explanatory. It is possible to focus remarks on specific passages or on the entire paper. It is also possible to reflect on a student’s progress by comparing the current work with previous work. Students perceive the digitized comments to be more convenient, more personal, and often clearer. While recorded commentary is particularly well suited to formative response designed to assist students in revising a draft in progress, it is also useful in providing summative response as well.”

http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/lta/

You are invited to review this latest LTA and post a comment regarding what you think of how Professor Sommers shares his comments with students enrolled in classes he teaches. Or respond to me and I will collect comments and share with the list.

Steven W. Gilbert, President, The TLT Group

TLT Group’s Events, including Free WebCasts: http://www.tltgroup.org/events.htm

As part of the PT3 grant, I’m working on a entry on the “$100 computer” project. As with any such project, the fundamental question is “so what,” so I went off to check up on the Cobb County (Georgia) project to provide 64,000 iBooks to students in high school, and then middle school.

Google led me to Tim Tyson’s I Just Have to Brag page describing a recent learning fair his students participated in. Wow.

More at From the desk of Dr. Tyson.

The Net Generation has grown up with information technology. The aptitudes, attitudes, expectations, and learning styles of Net Gen students reflect the environment in which they were raised—one that is decidedly different from that which existed when faculty and administrators were growing up.

This collection explores the Net Gen and the implications for institutions in areas such as teaching, service, learning space design, faculty development, and curriculum. Contributions by educators and students are included.

Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger, Editors, Educating the Net Generation, Educause, 2005.
http://www.educause.edu/books/educatingthenetgen/5989

Pending approval from the Board of Education, the Cobb County School District will partner with Apple to provide 63,000 Apple iBook G4 notebook computers, first to teachers this spring and to high school students in spring 2006.

The Cobb County School District is the largest school district to ever engage in a one-to-one computer initiative. The price of each iBook , based on a four-year lease, is $271.26 per year, less than the cost per computer in Maine & Michigan’s programs. Add in comprehensive training and local support, and the cost per student is only $350 annually.

The package includes a strong ongoing training program for teachers, staff, parents, students and tech leaders, including a dedicated center focused on leadership, learning, coaching and coordination of best practices for teachers within the district, and two dedicated staff-development specialists provided by Apple. (In addition, Apple will provide two staff development specialists. These trainers will help move teachers up the learning curve over the course of the program, from basic usage skills to advanced classroom integration at the individual teacher’s pace.)

http://www.cobb.k12.ga.us/powertolearn/main_index.htm

Between budget cuts and advancing technology, the traditional paper syllabus is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Diamondback, The University of Maryland’s Independent Student Newspaper, describes how the Department of Government and Politics has adopted a policy to no longer provide funds for duplication of course syllabi. Some professors have responded by paying for the printing out of their own pocket, others have handed out CD’s with the syllabi on them, but most seemed to have learned how to use the internet and web to publish their own.

Next? Coursepacks in online-reserve?

1. Spotted on Paul Martin’s English 086 blog, inlcuding comments.
http://pwmartin.blog.uvm.edu/086/archives/dept_saves_with_online_syllibi.php

2. Donna Chiu, “Dept. saves with online syllibi,” The Diamondback Online, University of Maryland, February 18, 2005.
http://www.diamondbackonline.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/02/18/42157434116a4?in_archive=1

3. University of Maryland, Government and Politics Department, Syllabi Site.
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/syllabi/

“First the Internet turned colleges upside down, extending classrooms and changing the way people learned. Next came Napster and other file-sharing tools, then Web logs. Now blogs are morphing into the next big thing on campus: wikis.

[...]

“Early e-mail lists, newsgroups and chat rooms were ephemeral, like a passing conversation, said Steve Jones, a communication professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Now computers and networks are fast enough that many people can share text, videos, sound and art and work on them together, he said, building a body of knowledge over time. Wikis, including interactive encyclopedia Wikipedia, have been around for several years but they’re just on the cusp of becoming mainstream; as the technology improves, they’re popping up in a few classrooms and offices, and people are finding all sorts of uses for them.

Article: Susan Kinzie, Interactive Web Pages Changing Class Participation, Washington Post, Friday, March 11, 2005; Page B01. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25305-2005Mar10.html

Photograph: Susan Biddle — The Washington Post, “Mark C. Rom uses blogs to heighten involvement among the students in his U.S. government class at Georgetown University.”

A growing movement of academic institutions is offering their course material online for free and software tools for making that material accessible, thanks to startup funds from philanthropic groups such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The movement begun by MIT’s OpenCourseWare project has so far brought in a number of other prestigious groups, such as the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Participants in the open courseware movement, in addition to interested Chinese and European academics, gathered at MIT in February to discuss best practices and coordinate efforts. A major concern is making it easier and less costly to put courseware online and keep it updated. Utah State University offers open source software that automatically converts existing course Web pages into material that conforms to open courseware standards; the software was developed with a $915,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation. Utah State instructional technology assistant professor David Wiley also led the creation of free chat-room software that allows open courseware users to have group-moderated discussions. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is also authoring free software to assist schools in publishing open courseware materials.

All of those involved in open courseware see their efforts as helping to fulfill their outreach missions, but are seeing benefits as alumni refresh their knowledge and students inquire about programs. Only MIT has made the commitment to put all its course material online, while other universities fill in the gaps with their own signature courses or classes not taught at MIT.

[*] Jeffery R. Young, Open Courseware’ Idea Spreads, Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. 51, No. 26, P. A32. March 04, 2005. Online: http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i26/26a03201.htm

[1] ACM Technews – Friday, March 4, 2005. http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2005-7/0304f.html

OrangeGuava is focused on allowing people to get their work done without needing to think like a computer.

OrangeGuava Desktop updates the desktop metaphor which has remained mostly unchanged for the past decade. A real world desktop has stacks of paper arranged informally in such a way that you always know where to find a piece of information, simply by knowing which side of the desk you always put that kind of information. This is combined with the functionality of a large pad of paper, to take notes in a similarly informal structure.
http://www.orangeguava.com/

“The world is an imperfect place, and Edward Felten likes to tinker with it.

“In December, Felten released the world’s smallest peer-to-peer file-sharing program — 15 lines of code he named tinyP2P — to prove that such programs could not easily be banned. Felten wrote tinyP2P with his graduate student Alex Halderman ‘03.

“It isn’t the first time the duo has caught the eye of the media. In 2003, Halderman discovered a way to bypass the copy-protection technique in CDs by pressing the Shift key. He was soon threatened with a lawsuit.

“For Felten, the opportunity to work with students like Halderman is what keeps him in the classroom. Felten finds that teaching enhances his ability to do his security research.

“Students are part of the key,” he said. “If you’re in the technology field and want to stay current, you need to have people around who know about the latest things . . . This is one of the big benefits of being at a university — there’s always a constant stream of smart students coming through.”

“Felten speaks out through a daily blog, http://freedom-to-tinker.com, which he started to advocate “freedom of ordinary users to adapt technologies to their cause.”

[1] Viola Huang. Fighting for the ‘freedom to tinker,’ Daily Princetonian, March 1, 2005. http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2005/03/01/news/12196.shtml

Connotea is a free online reference management service for scientists created by Nature Publishing Group.

Connotea stores your reference list online, and that provides many advantages: it’s readily accessible, it’s linked directly into the literature and it’s easily shared with colleagues. Opening your references to other researchers enables you to discover new leads by connecting to the collections of those with similar interests to you.